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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITEB STATES OF AMERICA, 



OTritm20 of J^arriet Wttt^tt ^totoe* 



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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers, 
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FLOWERS AND FRUIT FROM THE 
WRITINGS OF IIARRIET IM'^ - 
BEECHER^TOWE 



ARRANGED BY 



ABBIE H. FAIRFIELD 





BOSTON AND 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 






Copyriglit, 1888, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

The Inner Life 1 

CHAPTER II. 
Human Natube 55 

CHAPTER III. 
Woman 84 

CHAPTER IV. 
Children 105 

CHAPTER V. 
Education 118 

CHAPTER VI. 
Nature 134 

CHAPTER VII. 
Literature and Art 158 

CHAPTER VIII. 
New England Life 171 

CHAPTER IX. 
Miscellaneous 188 



FLO WEES AITD FETJIT. 



CHAPTER I. 
THE INNER LIFE. 

THE MESTISTER'S WOOING. 

Sympathy. When we feel a thing ourselves, we can 
see very quick the same in others. 

Self- When a finely constituted nature wishes 

deception. ^^ ^^ j^^^ baseness, it has first to bribe 
itself. Evil is never embraced, undisguised, as 
evil, but under some fiction which the mind 
accepts, and with which it has the singular power 
of bUnding itself in the face of dayUght. The 
power of imposing on one's self is an essential 
preliminary to imposing on others. The man 
first argues himself down, and then he is ready 
to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiv- 
ing others. 



Soul-corn- Perhaps it is so, that souls once inti- 
munion. jj^^tely related have ever after this a 
strange power of affecting each other, — a power 
that neither absence nor death can annul. How 
else can we interpret those mysterious hours in 



2 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

which the power of departed love seems to over- 
shadow us, making our souls vital with such long- 
ings, with such wild throbbings, with such unut- 
terable sighings, that a little more might burst 
the mortal bond ? Is it not deep calling unto 
deep? the free soul singing outside the cage to 
her mate beating against the bars within ? 

Soul- The greatest moral effects are like those 

absorption. <. . . 1^.11 

01 music, — not wrought out by sharp- 
sided intellectual propositions, but melted in by 
a divine fusion, by words that have mysterious, 
indefinite fulness of meaning, made living by 
sweet voices, which seem to be the out-throb- 
bings of angelic hearts. So one verse in the 
Bible read by a mother in some hour of tender 
prayer has a significance deeper and higher than 
the most elaborate of sermons, the most acute of 
arguments. 

Restric- Scarcely conscious, she lay in that dim, 
thebody clairvoyaut state, when the half-sleep of 
soui?^ the outward senses permits a delicious 
dewy clearness of the soul, that perfect 
ethereal rest and freshness of the faculties, com- 
parable only to what we imagine of the spiritual 
state, — season of celestial enchantment, in which 
the heavy weight " of all this unintelligible world " 
drops off, and the soul, divinely charmed, nestles 
like a wind-tossed bu'd in the protecting bosom 
of the One AU-perfect, All-beautiful. What vi- 
sions then come to the inner eye have often no 



THE INNER LIFE. 3 

words corresponding in mortal vocabularies. 
The poet, the artist, and the prophet in such 
hours become possessed of divine certainties 
which all their lives they struggle, with pencil 
or song or burning words, to make evident to 
their feUows. The world around wonders, but 
they are unsatisfied, because they have seen the 
glory and know how inadequate the copy. 

Courage in Half the misery in the world comes of 
want of courage to speak and to hear the 
truth plainly and in a spirit of love. 

MissPris- " Tho' I Can't say I 'm lone either, 
because nobody need say that, so long 
as there 's folks to be done for." 



Blessed- We could not afford to have it always 

ness vs. , ^ • ■, ■, ^ 

happi- night, — and we must thmk that the 
broad, gay morning-light, when meadow- 
lark and robin and bobolink are singing in chorus 
with a thousand insects and the waving of a 
thousand breezes, is on the whole the most in 
accordance with the average wants of those 
who have a material life to live and material 
work to do. But then we reverence that clear- 
obscure of midnight, when everything is still and 
dewy ; — then sing the nightingales, which can- 
not be heard by day ; then shine the mysterious 
stars. So when all earthly voices are hushed in 
the soul, all earthly lights darkened, music and 
color float in from a higher sphere. . . . By 



4 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

what name shall we call this beautiful twilight, 
this night of the soul, so starry with heavenly- 
mysteries ? Not happiness, but blessedness. 
They who have it walk among men as " sorrow- 
ful, yet alway rejoicing, as poor, yet making 
many rich, — as having nothing, and yet possess- 
ing all things." 

Laws of Is it not possible that He who made 
the world may have established laws for 
prayer as invariable as those for the sowing of 
seed and raising of grain ? Is it not as legiti- 
mate a subject of inquiry, when petitions are not 
answered, which of these laws has been neg- 
lected ? 

Influence No "^^^ artist or philosopher ever 
SvSbie lived who has not at some hours risen 
to the height of utter self-abnegation 
for the glory of the invisible. There have been 
painters who would have been crucified to demon- 
strate the action of a muscle, — chemists who 
would gladly have melted themselves and all 
humanity in their crucible, if so a new discovery 
might arise out of its fumes. Even persons of 
mere artistic sensibility are at times raised by 
music, painting, or poetry, to a momentary trance 
of self-oblivion, in which they would offer their 
whole being before the shrine of an invisible 
_ loveliness. . . . But where theorists and 

woman 

feels ; man philosophers tread with sublime assur- 
ance, woman often follows with bleed- 



THE INNER LIFE. 5 

ing footsteps ; — women are always turning 
from the abstract to the individual, and feeling 
where the philosopher only thinks. 

Love a sac- True love is a natural sacrament; and 
^™^" ' if ever a young man thanks God for 
having saved what is noble and manly in his soul, 
it is when he thinks of offering it to the woman 
he loves. 

God's " Mr. Scudder used to say that it took 

tests. 

great affliction to bring his mind to that 
place," said Mrs. Katy. " He used to say that an 
old paper-maker told him once, that paper that 
was shaken only one way in the making would 
tear across the other, and the best paper had to 
be shaken every way ; and so he said we could 
n't tell till we had been turned and shaken and 
tried every way, where we should tear." 

Uncon- So we ffo, — SO little knowing: what we 

scions c? ' o 

heart- touch and what touches us as we talk ! 

thrusts. xvr i i • p 

We drop out a common piece ot news, 
— " Mr. So-and-so is dead," — " Miss Such-a-one 
is married," — " Such a ship has sailed," — and 
lo, on our right hand or our left, some heart has 
sunk under the news silently, — gone down in 
the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble 
rising to teU its drowning pang. And this — 
God help us ! — is what we call living ! 

Repres- It was not pride, nor sternness, but a 
sort of habitual shamefacedness that 



6 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

kept far back in each soul those feelings which 
are the most beautiful in their outcome ; but 
after a while the habit became so fixed a nature 
that a caressing or affectionate expression could 
not have passed the lips of one to another with- 
out a painful awkwardness. Love was under- 
stood, once for all, to be the basis on which their 
life was built. Once for all, they loved each 
other, and after that, the less said, the better. It 
had cost the woman's heart of Mrs. Marvin some 
pangs, in the earlier part of her wedlock, to 
accept of this once for all in place of those daily 
outgushings which every woman desires should be 
like God's loving-kindnesses, " new every morn- 
ing ; " but hers, too, was a nature strongly inclin- 
ing inward, and, after a few tremulous move- 
ments, the needle of her soul settled, and her 
life-lot was accepted, — not as what she would 
like or could conceive, but as a reasonable and 
good one. Life was a picture painted in low, 
cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and though 
another and brighter style might have pleased 
better, she did not quarrel with this. 

Winged There are in this world two kinds of 
L^gspSs. iiatures, — those that have wings, and 
those that have feet, — the winged and 
the walking spirits. The walking are the logi- 
cians ; the winged are the instinctive and poetic. 
Natures that must always walk find many a bog, 
many a thicket, many a tangled brake, which 
God's happy little winged birds flit over by one 



THE INNER LIFE. 7 

noiseless flight. Nay, when a man has toiled till 
his feet weigh too heavily with the mud of earth 
to enable him to walk another step, these little 
birds will often cleave the air in a right line 
towards the bosom of God, and show the way 
where he could never have found it. 

Unity in The truly good are of one language 
prayer. .^ prayer. Whatever lines or angles of 
thought may separate them in other hours, when 
they pray in extremity, all good men pray alike. 
The Emperor Charles V. and Martin Luther, 
two great generals of opposite faiths, breathed 
out their dying struggles in the self-same words. 

Sympathy As well might thoso on the hither 
sS^ol!^ side of mortality instruct the souls gone 
beyond the veil, as souls outside a great 
affliction guide those who are struggling in it. 
That is a mighty baptism, and only Christ can 
go down with us into those waters. 

Agony of Against an uncertainty, who can brace 
^^, the soul? We put all our forces of 
faith and prayer against it, and it goes 
down just as a buoy sinks in the water, and the 
next moment it is up again. The soul fatigues 
itself with efforts which come and go in waves ; 
and when with laborious care it has adjusted all 
things in the light of hope, back flows the tide 
and sweeps all away. In such struggles life 
spends itself fast ; an inward wound does not 



8 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

carry one deathward more surely than this worst 
wound of the soul. God has made us so merci- 
fully that there is no certainty, however dreadful, 
to which life-forces do not in time adjust them- 
selves; but to uncertainty there is no possible 
adjustment. 

Candace's " 'Cause, as we 's got to live in dis yer 
theology, ^q^j^j^ \^ 'g quite clar de Lord must ha' 

fixed it so we can ; an' ef tings was as some 
folks suppose, why, we could n't live, and dar 
would n't be no sense in anyting dat goes on." 

Death in So wc go, dear reader, — so long as 
we have a body and a soul. For worlds 
must mingle, — the great and the little, the sol- 
emn and the trivial, wreathing in and out, like 
the grotesque carvings on a gothic shrine ; only, 
did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial, since 
the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes 
all things sacred. Have not ribbons, cast-off 
flowers, soiled bits of gauze, trivial, trashy frag- 
ments of millinery, sometimes had an awful 
meaning, a deadly power, when they belonged to 
one who should wear them no more, and whose 
beautiful form, frail and crushed as they, is a 
hidden and vanished thing for all time ? For so 
sacred and individual is a human being, that, of 
all the million-peopled earth, no one form ever 
restores another. The mould of each mortal 
type is broken at the grave ; and never, never, 
though you look through all the faces on earth. 



THE INNER LIFE. 9 

shall the exact form you mourn ever meet your 
eyes again ! You are living your daily life among 
trifles that one death-stroke may make rehcs. 
One false step, one luckless accident, an obstacle 
on the track of a train, the tangling of a cord in 
shifting a sail, and the penknife, the pen, the 
papers, the trivial articles of dress and clothing, 
which to-day you toss idly and jestingly from 
hand to hand, may become dread memorials of 
that awful tragedy whose deep abyss ever under- 
lies our common life. 

Memory. For oue flowcr laid on the shrine 
which we keep in our hearts for the dead is 
worth more than any gift to our living selves. 

Control " How could you help it, mignonne ? 
Noughts. Can you stop your thinking ? " 

Mary said, after a moment's blush, — 
"leaner?// " 

Minor Behind every scale of music, the gay- 
tions!^*" ®^* ^"^ cheeriest, the grandest, the most 
triumphant, lies its dark relative minor ; 
the notes are the same, but the change of a sem- 
itone changes all to gloom ; — all our gayest 
hours are tunes, that have a modulation into 
these dreary keys ever possible ; at any moment 
the keynote may be struck. 

The ideal Nothing is moro striking, in the light 
practical, and shadow of the human drama, than 



10 . ' FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

to compare the inner life and thoughts of ele- 
vated and silent natures with the thoughts and 
plans which those hy whom they are surrounded 
have of and for them. Little thought Mary of 
any of the speculations that busied the friendly 
head of Miss Prissy, or that lay in the provi- 
dent forecastings of her prudent mother. 

Perfect " Indeed, I am afraid something must 
^ ' be wrong with me. I cannot have any 

fears, — I never could ; I try sometimes, but the 
thought of God's goodness comes all around me, 
and I 'm so happy before I think of it." 

Under- All the little, mean work of our nature 
curren . j^ generally done in a small dark closet 
just a little back of the subject we are talk- 
ing about, on which subject we suppose ourselves 
of course to be thinking ; — of course, we are 
thinking of it ; how else could we talk about it ? 

The divine As to evcry leaf and every flower 
ideal. there is an ideal to which the growth of 

the plant is constantly urging, so is there an ideal 
to every human being, — a perfect form in which 
it might appear, were every defect removed, and 
every characteristic excellence stimulated to the 
highest point. Once in an age, God sends to 
some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false 
imagining, an unreal character, but, looking 
through all the rubbish of our imperfections, 
loves in us the divine ideal of our nature, — 



THE INNER LIFE. 11 

loves, not the man that we are, but the angel 
that we may be. 

Responsi- To feel the immortality of a beloved 
^'^*^" soul hanging upon us, to feel that its 
only communications with Heaven must be 
through us, is the most solemn and touching 
thought that can pervade a mind. 

Develop- What makes the love of a great mind 
ingpower something fearful in its inception is, 

of love. o p !.• I. 

that it is often the unsealmg of a hith- 
erto undeveloped portion of a large and power- 
ful being. 

Unsus- It is said that if a grapevine be 
fiSutnce planted in the neighborhood of a well, 
its roots, running silently underground, 
wreathe themselves in a network round the cold, 
clear waters, and the vine's putting on outward 
greenness and unwonted clusters and fruit is aU 
that tells where every root and fibre of its being 
has been silently stealing. So, those loves are 
most fatal, most absorbing, in which, with un- 
heeded quietness, every thought and fibre of our 
life twines gradually around some human soul, 
to us the unsuspected wellspring of our being. 
Fearful it is, because so often the vine must be 
uprooted, and all its fibres wrenched away ; but 
till the hour of discovery comes, how is it trans- 
figured by a new and beautiful life ! 



12 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Personal Gradually an expression of intense in- 
terest and deep concern spread over the 
listeners ; it was the magnetism of a strong mind, 
which held them for a time under the shadow of 
his own awful sense of God's almighty justice. 

It is said that a little child once described his 
appearance in the pulpit by saying, " I saw God 
there, and I was afraid." 

Soul- There is a ladder to heaven whose base 

growth, Q^^ j^^g placed in human affections, 
tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of 
love, through which the soul rises higher and 
higher, refining as she goes, till she outgrows the 
human, and changes, as she rises, into the image 
of the divine. At the very top of this ladder, 
at the threshold of Paradise, blazes dazzling and 
crystalline that celestial grade where the soul 
knows self no more, having learned, through a 
long experience of devotion, how blest it is to 
lose herself in that eternal Love and Beauty, of 
which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but 
the dim type, the distant shadow. 

Discipline. It is said that gardeners sometimes, 
when they would bring a rose to richer flower- 
ing, deprive it, for a time, of light and moisture. 
Silent and dark it stands, dropping one faded 
leaf after another, and seeming to go down 
patiently to death. But when every leaf is 
dropped, and the plant stands stripped to the 



THE INNER LIFE. 13 

uttermost, a new life is even then working in the 
buds, from which shall spring a tender foliage, 
and a brighter wealth of flowers. So, often 
in celestial gardening, every leaf of earthly joy 
must drop, before a new and divine bloom visits 
the soul. 

Idealizing In a refined and exalted nature, it is 
FovT'^*^* very seldom that the feeling of love, 
when once thoroughly aroused, bears 
any sort of relation to the reality of the object. 
It is commonly an enkindling of the whole power 
of the soul's love for whatever she considers 
highest and fairest ; it is, in fact, the love of 
something divine and unearthly, which, by a 
sort of illusion, connects itself with a person- 
ality. Properly speaking, there is but one true, 
eternal object of all that the mind conceives, in 
this trance of its exaltation. Disenchantment 
must come, of course ; and in a love which ter- 
minates in happy marriage, there is a tender and 
gracious process by which, without shock or vio- 
lence, the ideal is gradually sunk in the real, 
which, though found faulty and earthly, is still 
ever tenderly remembered as it seemed under 
the morning light of that enchantment. 



OLDTOWN FOLKS. 

Moral ear- It is noticeable, in every battle of opin- 
nes ness. .^^^ ^-^^^ honest, sincere, moral earnest- 



14 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

ness has a certain advantage over mere intellec- 
tual cleverness. 

struggling Plato savs that we all once had vrings, 

for higher -, ^ -, 'it . t , . • 

things. and that they will tend to grow out m 
us, and that our burnings and aspira- 
tions for higher things are like the teething 
pangs of children. We are trying to cut our 
wings. Let us not despise these teething seasons. 
Though the wings do not become apparent, they 
may be starting under many a rough coat and on 
many a clumsy pair of shoulders. 

Faith, not " I oftcn think," said Harry, listening 
^^^ ' for a moment, "that no one can pro- 

nounce on what this life has been to him until he 
has passed entirely through it, and turns around, 
and surveys it from the other world. I think 
then that we shall see everything in its true pro- 
portions ; but, till then, we must walk by faith, 
not by sight, — faith that God loves us, faith 
that our Savior is always near us, and that all 
things are working together for good." 

God's But certain it is that there is a very 
near way to God's heart, and so to the 
great heart of all comfort, that sometimes opens 
like a shaft of light between heaven and the soul, 
in hours when everything earthly falls away 
from us. A quaint old writer has said, "God 
keeps his choicest cordials for the time of our 
deepest faintings." And so it came to pass that, 



THE INNER LIFE. 15 

as this poor woman closed her eyes and prayed 
earnestly, there fell a strange clearness into her 
soul, which calmed every fear, and hushed the 
voice of every passion, and she lay for a season 
as if entranced. Words of Holy Writ, heard 
years ago in church readings, in the hours of 
miconscious girlhood, now seemed to come back, 
borne in with a loving power on her soul. 

snent com- The kind of silence which gives a sense 

paniouship. « ... '^ 

01 companionship. 
Moral in- Esther was one of those intense, silent, 

hentance. , , ' ' 

repressed women, that have been a fre- 
quent outgrowth of New England society. Moral 
traits, like physical ones, often intensify them- 
selves in course of descent, so that the child of a 
long line of pious ancestry may sometimes suffer 
from too fine a moral fibre, and become a victim 
to a species of morbid spiritual ideality. 

Esther looked to me, from the first, less like 
a warm, breathing, impulsive woman, less like 
ordinary flesh and blood, than some half-spiritual 
organization, every particle of which was a 
thought. 

Holiness Among all the loves that man has to 

01 age. ^ , 

woman, there is none so sacred and 
saint-like as that toward these dear, white-haired 
angels, who seem to form the connecting link 
between heaven and earth, who have lived to get 
the victory over every sin and every sorrow, and 



16 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

live perpetually on the banks of the dark river, 
in that bright, calm land of Beulah, where angels 
daily walk to and fro, and sounds of celestial 
music are heard across the water. 

Such have no longer personal cares, or griefs, 
or sorrows. The tears of life have all been shed, 
and therefore they have hearts at leisure to 
attend to every one else. Even the sweet guile- 
less childishness that comes on in this period has 
a sacred dignity ; it is a seal of fitness for that 
heavenly kingdom, which whosoever shaU not 
receive as a little child shall not enter therein. 

Unity in Has there ever been a step in human 
^'^ ^ ' progress that has not been taken against 
the prayers of some good soul, and been washed 
by tears sincerely and despondently shed ? But, 
for all this, is there not a true unity of the faith 
in all good hearts ? And when they have risen 
a little above the mists of earth, may not both 
sides — the conqueror and the conquered — agree 
that God hath given them the victory in advanc- 
ing the cause of truth and goodness ? 

Growth It has been the experience of my life 
wU;Mn. *^^* ^^ ^^ your quiet people who, above 
all other children of men, are set in 
their ways and intense in their opinions. Their 
very reserve and silence are a fortification 
behind which all their peculiarities grow and 
thrive at their leisure, without encountering those 
blows and shocks which materially modify more 



THE INNER LIFE. 17 

outspoken natures. It is owing to the peculiar 
power of quietness that one sometimes sees char- 
acters fashioning themselves in a manner the 
least to be expected from the circumstances and 
associates which surround them. As a fair white 
lily gi'ows up out of the bed of meadow muck, 
and without note or comment rejects all in the 
soil that is ahen from her being, and goes on 
fashioning her own silver cup side by side with 
weeds that are drawing coarser nutriment from 
the soil, so we often see a refined and gentle 
nature, by some singular internal force, unfolding 
itself by its own laws, and confirming itself in 
its own beliefs, as wholly different from all that 
surround it as is the lily from the ragweed. There 
are persons, in fact, who seem to grow almost 
wholly from within, and on whom the teachings, 
the doctrine, and the opinions of those around 
them, produce little or no impression. 

Amuse- It may be set down, I think, as a gen- 

merits 

eral axiom, that people feel the need of 
amusements less and less, precisely in proportion 
as they have solid reasons for being happy. 



Repres- Perhaps my readers may have turned 
over a great, flat stone some time in 
their rural rambles, and found under it little 
clovers, and tufts of grass pressed to earth, flat, 
white, and bloodless, but still growing, stretching, 
creeping towards the edges, where their plant- 
instinct tells them there is light and deliverance. 



18 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

The kind of life that the little Tina led, under 
the care of Miss Asphyxia, resembled that of 
these poor clovers. It was all shut down and 
repressed, but growing still. 

Sympathy. I felt a cleaving of spirit to him that I 
had never felt towards any human being before, 
— a certainty tha,t something had come to me in 
him that I had always been wanting, — and I 
was too glad for speech. 



Soul- Is it not true that, as we grow older, 

the relationship of souls will make itself 



relation. 

felt? 



PALMETTO LEAVES. 



Life No dreamland on earth can be more 

renew . unearthly in its beauty and glory than 
the St. Johns in April. Tourists, for the most 
part, see it only in winter, when half its gorgeous 
forests stand bare of leaves, and go home, never 
dreaming what it would be like in its resurrec- 
tion robes. So do we, in our darkness, judge 
the shores of the river of this mortal Hfe up 
which we sail, ofttimes disappointed and com- 
plaining. We are seeing aU things in winter, 
and not as they will be when God shall wipe 
away all tears, and bring about the new heavens 
and new earth of which every spring is a symbol 
and a prophecy. The flowers and leaves of last 
year vanish for a season, but they come back 
fresher and fairer than ever. 



THE INNER LIFE. 19 

A lesson On either side, perched on a tall, dry, 
last year's coffee-bean-stalk, sit " papa " 
and "mamma," chattering and scolding, exhort- 
ing and coaxing. The little ones run from side 
to side, and say in plaintive squeaks, " I can't," 
" I dare n't," as plain as birds can say it. There, 
— now they spread their little wings ; and oh, 
joy ! they find to their delight that they do not 
fall ; they exult in the possession of a new-born 
sense of existence. As we look at this pantomime, 
graver thoughts come over us. And we think 
how poor, timid, little souls moan, and hang back, 
and tremble, when the time comes to leave this 
nest of earth, and trust themselves to the free air 
of the world they were made for. As the little 
bird's moans and cries end in delight and raptm-e 
in finding himself in a new, glorious, free life ; so, 
just beyond the dark steps of death, will come a 
buoyant, exulting sense of new existence. 



PEARL OF ore's ISLAND. 

DiscipUne. The ship, built on one element, but 
designed to have its life in another, seemed an 
image of the soul, formed and fashioned with 
many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but 
finding its true element only when it sails out 
into the ocean of eternity. 

Heimweh. But there are souls sent into this world 
who seem to have always mysterious affinities 



20 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

for the invisible and the unknown — who see the 
face of everything beautiful through a thin veil 
of mystery and sadness. The Germans call this 
yearning of spirit " homesickness " — the dim 
remembrances of a spirit once affiliated to some 
higher sphere, of whose lost brightness all things 
fair are the vague reminders. 

Limitation. But Miss Emily knew no more of the 
deeper parts of her brother's nature than a little 
bird that dips its beak into the sunny waters of 
some spring knows of its depths of coldness and 
shadow. 

Learning The fact was, as the reader may per- 
.° °^^' ceive, that Miss Roxy had been thawed 
into an unusual attachment for the little Mara, 
and this affection was beginning to spread a 
warming element through her whole being. It 
was as if a rough granite rock had suddenly 
awakened to a passionate consciousness of the 
beauty of some fluttering white anemone that 
nestled in its cleft, and felt warm thrills running 
through all its veins at every tender motion and 
shadow. 

Fitful Such people are not very wholesome 
companions for those who are sensitively 
organized and predisposed to self-sacrificing love. 
They keep the heart in a perpetual freeze and 
thaw, which, like the American northern climate, 
is so particularly fatal to plants of a delicate 



THE INNER LIFE. 21 

habit. They could live through the hot summer 
and the cold winter, but they cannot endure the 
three or four months when it freezes one day and 
melts the next, — when all the buds are started 
out by a week of genial sunshine, and then 
frozen for a fortnight. These fitful persons are 
of all others most engrossing, because you are 
always sure in their good moods that they are 
just going to be angels, — an expectation which 
no number of disappointments seems finally to 
do away. 

Love— a Nothing so much shows what a human 
being is in moral advancement as the 
quality of his love. 



LITTLE FOXES. 

Altruistic The faults and mistakes of us poor 
human beings are as often perpetuated 
by despair as by any other one thing. Have we 
not all been burdened by a consciousness of 
faults that we were slow to correct because we 
felt discouraged ? Have we not been sensible of 
a real help sometimes from the presence of a 
friend who thought well of us, believed in us, set 
our wisdom in the best light, and put our faults 
in the background? 



Expression " Dispute your mother's hateful dogma, 
that love is to be taken for granted 



22 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

without daily proof between lovers ; cry down 
latent caloric in the market ; insist that the mere 
fact of being a wife is not enough, — that the 
words spoken once, years ago, are not enough, — 
that love needs new leaves every summer of life, 
as much as your elm-tree, and new branches to 
grow broader and wider, and new flowers at the 
root to cover the ground." 

Latent I remember my school-day speculations 

caloric. , , ,^ ^, . .. -.- 

over an old " Chemistry " I used to 
study as a text-book, which informed me that 
a substance called Caloric exists in all bodies. 
In some it exists in a latent state ; it is there, 
but it affects neither the senses nor the thermom- 
eter. Certain causes develop it, when it raises 
the mercury and warms the hands. I remem- 
ber the awe and wonder with which, even then, 
I reflected on the vast amount of blind, deaf, 
and dumb comfort which Nature had thus stowed 
away. How mysterious it seemed to me that 
poor families every winter should be shivering, 
freezing, and catching cold, when Nature had 
all this latent caloric locked up in her store-closet, 
— when it was all around them, in everything 
they touched and handled ! 

In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy 
to this. There is a great life-giving, warming 
power called Love, which exists in human hearts, 
dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no 
warming power, till set free by expression. 

Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day just before 



THE INNER LIFE. 23 

a snowstorm, sit at work in a room that was 
judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? 
You do not freeze, but you shiver ; your fingers 
do not become numb with cold, but you have all 
the while an uneasy craving for more positive 
warmth. You look at the empty grate, walk 
mechanically towards it, and, suddenly awaking, 
shiver to see that there is nothing there. You 
long for a shawl or a cloak ; you draw yourself 
within yourself ; you consult the thermometer, 
and are vexed to find that there is nothing there 
to be complained of, — it is standing most pro- 
vokingly at the exact temperature that all the 
good books and good doctors pronounce to be the 
proper thing, — the golden mean of health ; and 
yet perversely you shiver, and feel as if the face 
of an open fire would be to you as the smile of an 
angel. 

Such a life-long chill, such an habitual shiver, 
is the lot of many natures, which are not warm, 
when all ordinary rules tell them they ought to 
be warm, — whose life is cold and barren and 
meagre, — which never see the blaze of an open 
fire. 

Regret. The bitterest tears shed over graves are 
for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. 
" She never knew how I loved her." " He never 
knew what he was to me." " I always meant to 
make more of our friendship." " I never knew 
what he was to me till he was gone." Such 
words are the poisoned arrows which cruel Death 



24 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

shoots backward at us from the door of the 
sepulchre. 

How much more we might make of our family 
life, of our friendships, if every secret thought of 
love blossomed into a deed ! We are not now 
speaking of personal caresses. These may or 
may not be the best language of affection. Many 
are endowed with a delicacy, a fastidiousness of 
physical organization, which shrinks away from 
too much of these, repelled and overpowered. 
But there are words and looks and little observ- 
ances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little attentions, 
which speak of love, which make it manifest, and 
there is scarce a family that might not be richer 
in heart-wealth for more of them. 



HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS. 

First In this art of home-making I have set 

principles . . • r> 4. • • 

of home- down in my mind certain nrst princi- 
ma ng. pjgg^ j^jj^g ^jj^g axioiBS of Euclid, and the 
first is, — 

iVb hoTYie is possible without love. 

All business marriages and marriages of con- 
venience, all mere culinary marriages and mar- 
riages of mere animal passion, make the creation 
of a true home impossible in the outset. Love 
is the jewelled foundation of this New Jeru- 
salem descending from God out of heaven, and 
takes as many bright forms as the amethyst, 
topaz, and sapphire of that mysterious vision. 



THE INNER LIFE. 25 

In this range of creative art all things are possi- 
ble to him that loveth, but without love nothing 
is possible. 



THE CHIMNEY CORNER. 

Conversa- Real conversation presupposes intimate 
acquaintance. People must see each 
other often enough to wear off the rough bark 
and outside rind of commonplaces and conven- 
tionalities in which their real ideas are en- 
wrapped, and give forth without reserve their 
innermost and best feelings. 



Saintu- What makes saintllness, in my view, as 
distinguished from ordinary goodness, 
is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness 
of soul that bringfs life within the circle of the 
heroic. To be really great in little things, to be 
truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of 
every-day life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy 
of canonization. 

Teachings There IS a certain amount of suffering 
g suffer- -y^t^ich must follow the rending of the 
great cords of life, suffering which is 
natural and inevitable : it cannot be argued 
down ; it cannot be stilled ; it can no more be 
soothed by any effort of faith and reason than the 
pain of a fractured limb, or the agony of fire on 
the living flesh. All that we can do is to brace 



26 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

ourselves to bear it, calling on God, as the mar- 
tyrs did in the fire, and resigning ourselves to let 
it burn on. We must be willing to suffer, since 
God so wills. There are just so many waves to 
go over us, just so many arrows of stinging 
thought to be shot into our soul, just so many 
f aintings and sinkings and revi^dngs only to suffer 
again, belonging to and inherent in our portion 
of sorrow.; and there is a work of healing that 
God has placed in the hands of Time alone. 

Time heals all things at last ; yet it depends 
much on us in our sufferings, whether Time shall 
send us forth healed, indeed, but maimed and 
crippled and callous, or whether, looking to the 
great Physician of sorrows, and coworking with 
him, we come forth stronger and fairer even for 
our wounds. 

Help in One soul redeemed will do more to lift 
sorrow. ^^^^ burden of sorrow than all the bland- 
ishments and diversions of art, all the alleviations 
of luxury, all the sympathy of friends. 



THE MAYFLOWER. 

Aflanity of From that time a friendship commenced 
opposi es. i^g^^ggjj ^jjg ^^Q which was a beautiful 

illustration of the affinities of opposites. It was 
like a friendship between morning and evening, 
— all freshness and sunshine on one side, and all 
gentleness and peace on the other. 



THE INNER LIFE. 27 

Superior- It is one mark of a superior mind to 
^^" understand and be influenced by the 

superiority of others. 

Sympathy. The same quickness which makes a 
mind buoyant in gladness often makes it gentlest 
and most sympathetic in sorrow. 

God's It is well for man that there is one 
sympa y. jggjjjg ^j^q g^^g ^j^g suffering heart as 

it is, and not as it manifests itself through the 
repellences of outward infirmity, and who, per- 
haps, feels more for the stern and wayward than 
for those whose gentler feelings win for them 
human sympathy. 

Influence. He had traced her, even as a hidden 
streamlet may be traced, by the freshness, the 
verdure of heart, which her deeds of kindness 
had left wherever she had passed. 

Capacity A vcry Unnecessary and uncomfortable 
^' capacity oi feeling, which, like a refined 
ear for music, is undesirable, because, in this 
world, one meets with discord ninety-nine times 
where one meets with harmony once. 

Heart- How vcry Contrary is the obstinate esti- 

wisdom vs. pit , i • i j • 

worldly mate of the heart to the rational esti- 
wio om. jjjate of worldly wisdom ! Are there not 
some who can remember when one word, one 
look, or even the withholding of a word, has 



28 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

drawn their heart more to a person than all the 
substantial favors in the world? By ordinary 
acceptation, substantial kindness respects the 
necessaries of animal existence, while those 
wants which are peculiar to mind, and will exist 
with it forever, by equally correct classification, 
are designated as sentimental ones, the supply of 
which, though it will excite more gratitude in 
fact, ought not to in theory. 

Living From that time I . lived with her — and 
together, ^t^q^q ^re some persons who can make 
the word live signify much more than it com- 
monly does — and she wrought on my character 
all those miracles which benevolent genius can 
work. She quieted my heart, directed my feel- 
ings, unfolded my mind, and educated me, not 
harshly or by force, but as the blessed sunshine 
educates the flower, into full and perfect life; 
and when all that was mortal of her died to this 
world, her words and deeds of unutterable love 
shed a twilight around her memory that will fade 
only in the brightness of heaven. 

Minister- What then ? May we look among the 
ing spirits. ^^^^ ^j. ministering spirits for our own 
departed ones? Whom would God be more 
likely to send us ? Have we in heaven a friend 
who knew us to the heart's core ? a friend to 
whom we have unfolded our soul in its most 
secret recesses ? to whom we have confessed our 
weaknesses and deplored our griefs ? If we are 



THE INNER LIFE. 29 

to have a ministering spirit, who better adapted ? 
Have we not memories which correspond to such 
a belief? When our soul has been cast down, 
has never an invisible voice whispered, " There 
is lifting up " ? Have not gales and breezes of 
sweet and healing thought been wafted over us, 
as if an angel had shaken from his wings the 
odors of paradise ? Many a one, we are confident, 
can remember such things, — and whence come 
they ? Why do the children of the pious mother, 
whose grave has grown green and smooth with 
years, seem often to walk through perils and 
dangers fearful and imminent as the crossing of 
Mohammed's fiery gulf on the edge of a drawn 
sword, yet walk unhurt ? Ah ! could we see that 
attendant form, that face where the angel con- 
ceals not the mother, our question would be 
answered. 

Influence Something there is in the voice of real 
mother's pi^^ycr that thrills a child's heart, even 
prayer. before he understands it ; the holy 
tones are a kind of heavenly music, and far-off 
in distant years, the callous and worldly man 
often thrills to his heart's core, when some turn 
of life recalls to him his mother's prayer. 



PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY. 



Taught by It sometimes seems to take a stab, a 
ermg. ^^^^g^^ ^ wouud, to Open in some hearts 



30 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

the capacity of deep feeling and deep thought. 
There are things taught by suffering that can be 
taught in no other way. By suffering sometimes 
is wrought out in a person the power of loving 
and of appreciating love. During the first year, 
Lillie had often seemed to herself in a sort of 
wild, chaotic state. The coming in of a strange, 
new, spiritual life was something so inexplicable 
to her that it agitated and distressed her ; and 
sometimes, when she appeared more petulant and 
fretful than usual, it was only the stir and vibra- 
tion on her weak nerves of new feelings, which 
she wanted the power to express. These emo- 
tions at first were painful to her. She felt weak, 
miserable, and good-for-nothing. It seemed to 
her that her whole life had been a wretched 
cheat, and that she had ill repaid the devotion of 
her husband. At first these thoughts only made 
her bitter and angry ; and she contended against 
them. But, as she sank from day to day, and 
grew weaker and weaker, she grew more gentle ; 
and a better spirit seemed to enter into her. 

The object " The great object of life is not happi- 
ness ; and when we have lost our own 
personal happiness, we have not lost all that life 
is worth living for. No, John, the very best of 
life often lies beyond that. When we have 
learned to let ourselves go, then we may find 
that there is a better, a nobler, and a truer life 
for us." . . . " If we contend with, and fly from 
our duties, simply because they gall us and bur- 



THE INNER LIFE. 81 

den us, we go against everything ; but if we take 
them up bravely, then everything goes with us. 
God and good angels and good men and all good 
influences are working with us when we are 
working for the right. And in this way, John, 
you may come to happiness ; or, if you do not 
come to personal happiness, you may come to 
something higher and better. You know that 
you think it nobler to be an honest man than a 
rich man ; and I am sure that you will think 
it better to be a good man than to be a happy 
one." 

Self- It is astonishing how blindly people 

Ignorance. gQjQjj^jjjjgg gQ q-,^ ^g ^q ^]^q character of 

their own conduct, till suddenly, like a torch in a 
dark place, the light of another person's opinion 
is thrown in upon them, and they begin to judge 
themselves under the quickening influence of 
another person's moral magnetism. Then, in- 
deed, it often happens that the graves give up 
their dead, and that there is a sort of interior 
resurrection nnd judgment. 

Sympathy. When WG are feeling with the nerves of 
some one else, we notice every roughness and in- 
convenience. 

ciairvoy- A terrible sort of clairvoyance that 
*°^^' seems to beset very sincere people, and 

makes them sensitive to the presence of anything 
unreal or untrue. 



32 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Unacknow- No, she did not say it. It would be 

motSes. "^^^^ ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^ ^® ^^^ P^^* '^^^^ words, 

plain and explicit, many instinctive re- 
solves and purposes that arise in our hearts, and 
which, for want of being so expressed, influence 
us undetected and unchallenged. If we would 
say out boldly, " I don't care for right or wrong, 
or good or evil, or anybody's rights or anybody's 
happiness, or the general good, or God himself, 
— all I care for, or feel the least interest in, is 
to have a good time myself, and I mean to do it, 
come what may," — we should be only express- 
ing a feeling which often lies in the dark back- 
room of the human heart ; and saying it might 
alarm us from the drugged sleep of life. It 
might rouse us to shake oif the slow, creeping 
paralysis of selfishness and sin before it is for- 
ever too late. 



Betty's bright idea. 

Aspiration. That noble discontent that rises to aspi- 
ration for higher things. 



DEACON" Pitkin's farm. 

The lesson " Well, daughter," said the deacon, 

" it 's a pity we should go through all 

we do in this world and not learn anything by it. 

I hope the Lord has taught me not to worry, but 



THE INNER LIFE. 33 

just do my best, and leave myself and everything 
else in his hands. We can't help ourselves, — 
we can't make one hair white or black. Why 
should we wear our lives out fretting ? If I 'd a 
known that years ago, it would a been better for 
us all." 

" All for " She 's allers sayin' things is for the 
^ ^ ■ best, maybe she '11 come to think so 
about this, — folks gen'ally does when they can't 
help themselves." 

Sympathy. Eyes that have never wept cannot com- 
prehend sorrow. 

Trust. " Leave it ! " 

These were words often in that woman's mouth, 
and they expressed that habit of her life which 
made her victorious over all troubles, that habit 
of trust in the Infinite Will that actually could 
and did leave every accomplished event in his 
hand without murmur and without conflict. 



AGNES OF SORRENTO. 

Power of Such is the wonderful power of human 
sympa y. gyj^pg^^j^y- ^^^d, the discovery even of the 
existence of a soul capable of understanding our 
inner life often operates as a perfect charm ; 
every thought and feeling and aspiration carries 
with it a new value, from the interwoven con- 



34 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

sciousness that attends it, of the worth it would 
bear to that other mind ; so that, while that per- 
son lives, our existence is doubled in value, even 
though oceans divide us. 

Difficulty But he soon discovered, what every 
fng'Sers. earnest soul learns who has been bap- 
tized into a sense of things invisible, 
how utterly powerless and inert any mortal man 
is to inspire others with his own insights and 
convictions. With bitter discouragement and 
chagrin, he saw that the spiritual man must for- 
ever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and 
indifference and animal sensuality that surround 
him, — that the curse of Cassandra is upon him, 
forever to burn and writhe under awful visions 
of truths which no one around him will regard. 

Good As a bee can extract pure honey from 

we?eekit. *^^ blossoms of some plants whose 
leaves are poisonous, so some souls can 
nourish themselves only with the holier and more 
ethereal parts of popular belief. 

Naivete. " Blessed are the flowers of God that 
grow in cool solitudes, and have never been pro- 
faned by the hot sun and dust of this world." 

Sorrow a Never does love strike so deep and im- 
tionfor mediate a root as in a sorrowful and 
desolated nature ; there it has nothing 
to dispute the soil, and soon fills it with its inter- 
lacing fibre. 



i 



THE INNER LIFE. 35 

o?t£^^ "He is happy, like the birds," said 
heart. Agnes, " because he flies near heaven." 

Dreams. Dreams are the hushing of the bodily 
senses, that the eyes of the spirit may open. 

Lost inno- When a man has once lost that uncon- 
coverabie." scious soul-purity which exists in a mind 
unscathed by the fires of passion, no 
after-tears can weep it back again. No penance, 
no prayer, no anguish of remorse, can give back 
the simplicity of a soul that has never been 
stained . 

The strong- No passions are deeper in their hold, 
sSns.*^" more pervading and more vital to the 
whole human being, than those that 
make their first entrance through the higher 
nature, and, beginning with a religious and 
poetic ideality, gradually work their way through 
the whole fabric of the human existence. From 
grosser passions, whose roots lie in the senses, 
there is always a refuge in man's loftier nature. 
He can cast them aside with contempt, and leave 
them as one whose lower story is flooded can 
remove to a higher loft, and live serenely with a 
purer air and wider prospect. But to love that 
is born of ideality, of intellectual sympathy, of 
harmonies of the spiritual and immortal nature, 
of the very poetry and purity of the soul, if it be 
placed where reason and religion forbid its exer- 
cise and expression, what refuge but the grave, — 



86 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

what hope but that wide eternity where all human 
barriers fall, all human relations end, and love 
ceases to be a crime. 

Agony in It is singular how the dumb, imprisoned 
soul, locked within the walls of the 
body, sometimes gives such a piercing power to 
the tones of the voice during the access of a great 
agony. The effect is entirely involuntary and 
often against the most strenuous opposition of 
the will ; but one sometimes hears another read- 
ing or repeating words with an intense vitality, a 
living force, which tells of some inward anguish 
or conflict of which the language itself gives no 
expression. 

A sympa- The great Hearer of Prayer regards 

thetic God. t ^ • ' •. p • • 

each heart in its own scope or vision, 
and helps not less the mistaken than the enlight- 
ened distress. And for that matter, who is 
enlightened? who carries to God's throne a 
trouble or a temptation in which there is not 
somewhere a misconception or a mistake ? 

Transient "We hold it better to have even transient 
up mg. |jpiift;jjigg Qf j^i^Q nobler and more devout 

element of man's nature than never to have any 
at all, and that he who goes on in worldly and 
sordid courses, without ever a spark of religious 
enthusiasm or a throb of aspiration, is less of a 
man than he who sometimes soars heavenward, 
though his wings be weak and he fall again. 



THE INNER LIFE. 37 

Coinci- When a man has a sensitive or sore 
dence. ^^^^ -^ j^^^ heart, from the pain of 

which he would gladly flee to the ends of the 

earth, it is marvellous what coincidences of events 

will he found to press upon it wherever he 

may go. 

suenceof They hoth sat awhile in that kind of 
deep emo- Qujetude which often falls between two 

tion. ^ t c • jc 

who have stirred some deep tountain oi 
emotion. 

Innocence. There is something pleading and pitiful 
in the simplicity of perfect ignorance, — a rare 
and delicate beauty in its freshness, like the 
morning-glory cup, which, once withered by the 
heat, no second morning can restore. 

World " This is such a beautiful world," said 
conflicts, ^gj^gg^ u ^^Q ^ouia think it would be 

such a hard one to live in ? — such battles and 
conflicts as people have here 1 " 

Nervous As one looking through a prism sees a 
sensibility. ^^^ bordering of rainbow on every ob- 
ject, so he beheld a glorified world. His former 
self seemed to him something forever past and 
gone. He looked at himself as at another per- 
son, who had sinned and suffered, and was now 
resting in beatified repose ; and he fondly thought 
all this was firm reality, and believed that he 
was now proof against all earthly impressions, 



38 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

able to hear and to judge with the dispassionate 
calmness of a disembodied spirit. He did not 
know that this high-strung calmness, this fine 
clearness, were only the most intense forms of 
nervous sensibility, and as vividly susceptible to 
every mortal impression as is the vitalized chem- 
ical plate to the least action of the sun's rays. 



UNCLE TOM's cabin. 

Sorrow an Any mind that is capable of a real sor- 

educator. . i ^ c i 

TOW IS capable oi good. 

Individ- Now, the reflections of two men, sitting 
^' side by side, are a curious thing, — 
seated on the same seat, having the same eyes, 
ears, hands, and organs of all sorts, and having 
pass before their eyes the same objects, — it is 
wonderful what a variety we shall find in these 
same reflections. 

inspira- By what Strange law of mind is it that 
an idea, long overlooked, and trodden 
under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles 
out in new light, as a discovered diamond. 

Power of Sublime is the dominion of the mind 
bSdy.''^^'^ over the body, that, for a time, can 
make flesh and nerve impregnable, and 
string the sinews like steel, so that the weak 
become so mighty. 



THE INNER LIFE. 39 

True he- Have not many of us, in the weary way 
of life, felt, in some hours, how far 
easier it were to die than to live ? 

The martyr, when faced even by a death of 
bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very ter- 
ror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. 
There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, 
which may carry through any crisis of suffering 
that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest. 

But to live, — to wear on, day after day, of 
mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every 
nerve dampened and depressed, every power of 
feeling gradually smothered, — this long and 
wasting heart martyrdom, this slow, daily bleed- 
ing away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour 
after hour, — this is the true searching test of 
what there may be in man or woman. 

Moral at- An atmosphere of sympathetic influence 

mosphere. . , i , 

encircles every human being; and the 
man or woman who/eeZs strongly, healthily, and 
justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a 
constant benefactor to the human race. 

Seif-sacri- There are in this world blessed souls, 
whose sorrows all spring up into joys 
for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the 
grave with many tears, are the seed from which 
spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate 
and the distressed. 



strength of When a heavy weight presses the soul 
to the lowest level at which endurance 



40 FLOWEKS AND FRUIT. 

is possible, there is an instant and desperate 
effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw- 
off the weight ; and hence the heaviest anguish 
often precedes a return tide of joy and courage. 



Self-forget- " Thee uses thyself only to learn how to 
love thy neighbor, Ruth," said Simeon, 
looking with a beaming face on Ruth. 



Natural He had one of those natures which 
seJiSbmty. could better and more clearly conceive 
of religious things from its own percep- 
tions and instincts than many a matter-of-fact and 
practical Christian. The gift to appreciate and 
the sense to feel the finer shades and relations of 
moral things often seems an attribute of those 
whose whole life shows a careless disregard of 
them. Hence, Moore, Byron, Goethe, often speak 
words more wisely descriptive of the true reli- 
gious sentiment, than another man whose whole 
life is governed by it. In such minds, disregard 
of religion is a more fearful treason, — a more 
deadly sin. 

Supersti- No one is so thoroughly superstitious as 
the godless man. The Christian is com- 
posed by the belief of a wise, all-ruling Father, 
whose presence fills the void unknown with light 
and order ; but to the man who has dethroned 
God, the spirit-land is, indeed, in the words of 
the Hebrew poet, " a land of darkness and the 
shadow of death," without any order, where the 



THE INNER LIFE. 41 

light is as darkness. Life and death to him are 
haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of 
vague and shadowy dread. 

The human After aU, let a man take what pains he 
may to hush it down, a human soul is 
an awful ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad 
man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds 
of it ? Who knows all its awful perhapses, — 
those shudderings and tremblings which it can 
no more live down than it can outlive its own 
eternity ! What a fool is he who locks his door 
to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom 
a spirit he dares not meet alone, — whose voice, 
smothered far down, and piled over with moun- 
tains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning 
trumpet of doom ! 



' DRED. 

Practical The divine part of man is often shame- 
faced and seK-distrustful, iU at home in 
this world, and standing in awe of nothing so 
much as what is called common sense ; and yet 
common sense very often, by its own keenness, 
is able to see that these unavailable currencies of 
another's mind are of more worth, if the world 
only knew it, than the ready coin of its own ; and 
so the practical and the ideal nature are drawn 
together. 



42 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

inexpiica- Sensitive people never like the fatigue 
ences^^ ^^' of justifying their instincts. Nothing, 
in fact, is less capable of being justified 
by technical reasons than those fine insights into 
character whereupon affection is built. We have 
all had experience of preferences vrhich would 
not follow the most exactly ascertained catalogue 
of virtues, and would be made captive where 
there was very little to be said in justification of 
the captivity. 

Congenial- " Why, surely," said Anne, " one wants 
posites!^' one's friends to be congenial, I should 
think." 
" So we do ; and there is nothing in the world 
so congenial as differences. To be sure, the 
differences must be harmonious. In music, now, 
for instance, one does n't want a repetition of the 
same notes, but differing notes that chord. Nay, 
even discords are indispensable to complete har- 
mony. Now, Nina has just that difference from 
me which chords with me ; and all our little 
quarrels — for we have had a good many, and I 
dare say shall have more — are only a sort of 
chromatic passages, — discords of the seventh, 
leading into harmony. My Hfe is inward, the- 
orizing, self-absorbed. I am hypochondriac, 
often morbid. The vivacity and acuteness of her 
outer life makes her just what I need. She 
wakens, she rouses, and keeps me in play ; and 
her quick instincts are often more than a match 
for my reason." 



THE INNER LIFE. 43 

Proof of " How do you know there is any heaven, 

heaven. ■, ^ j> 

anyhow r 
" Know it ? " said Milly, her eyes kindling, 
and striking her staff on the ground, " Know it ? 
I know it by de hankering arter it I got in 
here ; " giving her broad chest a blow which 
made it resound like a barrel. " De Lord 
knowed what he was 'bout when he made us. 
When he made babies rootin' 'round, wid der 
poor little mouths open, he made milk, and de 
mammies for 'em too. Chile, we 's nothing but 
great babies, dat ain't got our eyes open, — 
rootin' 'round an' 'round ; but de Father 'U feed 
us yet — He will so." 

Power of As oil will find its way into crevices 
^°^^' where water cannot penetrate, so song 

will find its way where speech can no longer 
enter. 

Night reso- What we have thought and said under 

lutions. ,1 , i? -J • i 

the august presence oi witnessing stars, 
or beneath the holy shadows of moonlight, seems 
with the dry, hot heat of next day's sun to take 
wings, and rise to heaven with the night's clear 
drops. If all the prayers and good resolutions 
which are laid down on sleeping pillows could 
be found there on awaking, the world would be 
better than it is. 

Transition There are times in life when the soul, 
peno s. Y[^^ ^ half-grown climbing vine, hangs 



44 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

hovering tremulously, stretching out its tendrils 
for something to ascend by. Such are generally 
the great transition periods of life, when we are 
passing from the ideas and conditions of one 
stage of existence to those of another. Such 
times are most favorable for the presentation of 
the higher truths of religion. 

Connection This life may truly be called a haunted 
l^iTit ^ house, built as it is on the very confines 
world. ^^ ^j^g Ysind of darkness and the shadow 
of death. A thousand living fibres connect us 
with the unknown and unseen state ; and the 
strongest hearts, which never stand still for any 
mortal terror, have sometimes hushed their very 
beating at a breath of a whisper from within the 
veil. Perhaps the most resolute unbeliever in 
spiritual things has hours of which he would be 
ashamed to tell, when he, too, yields to the 
powers of those awful affinities which bind us to 
that unknown realm. 

Suffering It is the last triumph of affection and 
in silence, magnanimity, when a loving heart can 
respect the suffering silence of its beloved, and 
allow that lonely liberty in which only some 
natures can find comfort. 

Joy in en- And, as he sang and prayed, that 
durance. g^^ange joy arose within him, which, 
like the sweetness of night flowers, is bora of 
darkness and tribulation. The soul has in it 



THE INNER LIFE. 45 

somewhat of the divine, in that it can have joy- 
in endurance beyond the joy of indulgence. 

They mistake who suppose that the highest 
happiness lies in wishes accomplished — in pros- 
perity, wealth, favor, and success. There has 
been a joy in dungeons and on racks passing the 
joy of harvest. A joy strange and solemn, 
mysterious even to its possessor. A white stone 
dropped from that signet ring, peace, which a 
dying Saviour took from his own bosom, and 
bequeathed to those who endure the cross, de- 
spising the shame. 



SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS. 

Inward How natural it is to say of some place 
sheltered, simple, cool, and retired, here 
one might find peace, as if peace came from 
without, and not from within. In the shadiest 
and stillest places may be the most turbulent 
hearts, and there are hearts which, through the 
busiest scenes, carry with them unchanging peace. 

Grace in I have read of Alpine flowers leaning 
their cheeks on the snow. I wonder if 
any flowers grow near enough to that snow to 
touch it. I mean to go and see. So I went ; 
there, sure enough, my little fringed purple bell, 
to which I had give the name of " suspirium," 
was growing, not only close to the snow but in it. 
Thus God's grace, shining steadily on the 



46 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

waste places of the human heart, brings up heav- 
enward sighings and aspirations, which pierce 
through the cold snows of affliction, and tell that 
there is yet life beneath. 

God as an I was glad to walk on alone : for the 
scenery was so wonderful that human 
sympathy and communion seemed to be out of 
the question. The effect of such scenery to our 
generally sleeping and drowsy souls, bound with 
a double chain of earthliness and sin, is like the 
electric touch of the angel on Peter, bound and 
sleeping. They make us realize that we were 
not only made to commune with God, but also 
what a God He is with whom we may commune. 
We talk of poetry, we talk of painting, we go to 
the ends of the earth to see the artists and great 
men of this world ; but what a poet, what an 
artist, is God ! Truly said Michel Angelo, " The 
true painting is only a copy of the divine perfec- 
tions — a shadow of his pencil." 

Soui-striv- The human soul seems to me an impris- 
^"^' oned essence, striving after somewhat 

divine. There is strength in it, as of suffocated 
flame, finding vent now through poetry, now in 
painting, now in music, sculpture, or architecture ; 
various are the crevices and fissures, but the 
flame is one. 

Shadow. What a curious kind of thing shadow 
is, — that invisible veil, falling so evenly and so 



THE INNER LIFE. 47 

lightly over all things, bringing with it such 
thoughts of calmness and rest. I wonder the old 
Greeks did not build temples to Shadow, and call 
her the sister of Thought and Peace. The 
Hebrew writers speak of the "overshadowing 
of the Almighty ; " they call his protection " the 
shadow of a great rock in a weary land." Even 
as the shadow of Mont Blanc f aUs like a Sabbath 
across this valley, so falls the sense of his pres- 
ence across our weary life-road. 

Heimweh. Why? why this veil of dim and inde- 
finable anguish at sight of whatever is most fair, 
at hearing whatever is most lovely ? Is it the 
exiled spirit, yearning for its own? Is it the 
captive, to whom the ray of heaven's own glory 
comes tlirough the crevice of his dungeon wall ? 

feS ^"^^ ^^ ^^ ^^* enough to open one's eyes on 
scenes; one must be able to be "en 
rapport" with them. Just so in the spiritual 
world, we sometimes see great truths, — see that 
God is beautiful and surpassingly lovely ; but at 
other times we feel both nature and God, and O, 
how different seeing and feeling I 



POGA]SrUC PEOPLE.* 

Kvlin ^^^^^ ^^® ^^^^' ^i"^"l' unlovely souls, 
the un- who yet long to be loved, who sigh in 

lovely. ii • 1 1 . ft ° 

their dark prison for that tenderness, 



48 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

that devotion, of which they are consciously 
unworthy. Love might redeem them ; but who 
can love them ? There is a fable of a prince, 
doomed by a cruel enchanter to wear a loath- 
some, bestial form, till some fair woman should 
redeem him by the transforming kiss of love. 
The fable is a parable of the experience of many 
a lost human soul. . . . 

Who can read the awful mysteries of a single 
soul ? We see human beings, hard, harsh, earthly, 
and apparently without an aspiration for any- 
thing high and holy ; but let us never say that 
there is not far down in the depths of any soul a 
smothered aspiration, a dumb, repressed desire 
to be something higher and purer, to attain the 
perfectness to which God calls it. 



LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW. 

Seeing the " She shall be called little Pussy Willow, 
lilt^ ^^^ I shall give her the gift of always 
seeing the bright side of everything. 
That gift will be more to her than beauty or 
riches or honors. It is not so much matter what 
color one's eyes are as what one sees with them. 
There is a bright side to everything, if people 
only knew it, and the best eyes are those which 
are always able to see this bright side." 



THE INNER LIFE. 49 



A DOG S MISSION. 

Reaction A conscientious person should beware 

of harsh- p ,•• • j. ' £ 

ness. ot getting into a passion, tor every 

sharp word one speaks comes back and 
lodges like a sliver in one's own heart ; and such 
slivers hurt us worse than they ever can any one 
else. 

Man's Ah, the child is father of the man ! 
patience!"^" when he gets older he will have the 
great toys of which these are emblems ; 
he will believe in what he sees and touches, — in 
house, land, raih'oad stock, — he will believe in 
these earnestly and really, and in his eternal 
manhood nominally and partially. And when 
his father's messengers meet him, and face him 
about, and take him off his darling pursuits, and 
sweep his big ships into the fire, and crush his 
full-grown cars, then the grown man will com- 
plain and murmur, and wonder as the little man 
does now. The Father wants the future, the 
Child the present, all through life, till death 
makes the child a man. 



MY "WIFE AND I. 

Discipline The moral discipline of bearing with 
pa lence. ^^.^ p^^-jgjj^iy jg g^ great deal better and 

more ennobling than the most vigorous assertion 
of one's personal rights. 



50 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Ennobling When WG look at the apparent reckless- 
6oraow° ness with which great sorrows seem to 
be distributed among the children of the 
earth, there is no way to keep our faith in a 
Fatherly love, except to recognize how invariably 
the sorrows that spring from love are a means of 
enlarging and dignifying a human being. Noth- 
ing great or good comes without birth-pangs, and 
in just the proportion that natures grow more 
noble their capacities of suffering increase. 

Line be- The line between right and wrong seems 
aad^wrong. alvrays so indefinite, like the line be- 
tween any two colors of the prism ; it 
is hard to say just where one ends and another 
begins. 

Doubt. " Doubt is very well as a sort of consti- 
tutional crisis in the beginning of one's life ; but 
if it runs on and gets to be chronic it breaks a 
fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and 
sickly. Men that do anything in the world must 
be men of strong convictions ; it won't do to go 
through life like a hen, craw-crawing and lifting 
up one foot, not knowing where to set it down 
next." 

Friends. " I don't think," said she, " you should 
say ' make ' friends, — friends are discover ed, 
rather than made. There are people who are in 
their own nature friends, only they don't know 
each other ; but certain things, like poetry, music, 



THE INNER LIFE. 51 

and painting, are like the free-masons' signs, — 
they reveal the initiated to each other." 



WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS. 

Forgive- " Yes," Said Harry, " forgiveness of 
friends. enemies used to be the ultima thule of 
virtue ; but I rather think it will have 
to be forgiveness of friends. I call the man a 
perfect Christian that can always forgive his 
friends." 

Altruism. Do not our failures and mistakes often 
come from discouragement? Does not every 
human being need a believing second self, whose 
support and approbation shall reinforce one's 
failing courage ? The saddest hours of life are 
when we doubt ourselves. To sensitive, excitable 
people, who expend nervous energy freely, must 
come many such low tides. " Am I really a 
miserable failure, — a poor, good-for-nothing, 
abortive attempt ? " In such crises we need 
another self to restore our equilibrium. 

Reproach. The agony of his self-reproach and 
despair had been doubled by the reproaches and 
expostulations of many of his own family friends, 
who poured upon bare nerves the nitric acid of 
reproach. 

Help from Something definite to do is, in some 
crises, a far better medicine for a sick 



52 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

soul than any amount of meditation and prayer. 
One step fairly taken in a right direction goes 
farther than any amount of agonized back-looking. 

Praise and Praise is sunshine ; it warms, it inspires, 
it promotes growth : blame and rebuke 
are rain and hail ; they beat down and bedraggle, 
even though they may at times be necessary. 

God work- The invisible Christ must be made 
man. ^°"^ known through human eyes ; He must 
speak though a voice of earthly love, 
and a human hand inspired by his spirit must be 
reached forth to save. 

Inner life. The external life is positive, visible, 
definable ; easily made the subject of conversa- 
tion. The inner life is shy, retiring, most diffi- 
cult to be expressed in words, often inexplicable, 
even to the subject of it, yet no less a positive 
reality than the outward. 



RELIGIOtJS POEMS. 

Peace For not alone in those old Eastern re- 
through . 

suffering. glOnS 

Are Christ's beloved ones tried by cross 
and chain ; 
In many a house are his elect ones hidden, 
His martyrs suffering in their patient pain. 
The rack, the cross, life's weary wrench of woe, 



THE INNER LIFE. 53 

The world sees not, as slow, from day to day, 
In calm, mispoken patience, sadly still. 
The loving spirit bleeds itself away ; 
But there are hours, when from the heavens un- 
folding 
Come down the angels with the glad release. 
And we look upward, to behold in glory 
Our suffering loved ones borne away to peace. 

The spirit As some rare perfume in a vase of clay 
within. Pervades it with a fragrance not its 

own, 
So, when Thou dwellest in a mortal soul. 
All heaven's own sweetness seems around it 
thrown. 

The calm When winds are raging o'er the upper 

of God's 

love. ocean. 

And billows wild contend with angry 
roar, 
'T is said, far down beneath the wild commotion, 
That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore. 
Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth, 
And silver waves chime ever peacefully ; 
And no rude storm, how fierce soe'er he flieth, 
Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea. 
So to the soul that knows thy love, O Purest, 
There is a temple peaceful evermore ! 
And all the babble of life's angry voices 
Die in hushed stillness at its sacred door. 



God's com- Think not, when the wailing winds of 

fort. , 

autumn 



54 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Drive the shivering leaflets from the trees, — 
Think not all is over : spring returneth ; 
Buds and leaves and blossoms thou shalt see. 
Think not, when thy heart is waste and dreary, 
When thy cherished hopes lie chill and sere, — 
Think not all is over : God still loveth ; 
He will wipe away thy every tear. 



CHAPTER 11. 
HUMAN NATURE. 

THE minister's WOOING. 

Ignorant He was one of that class of people 

selfishness. r r j? • i 'n i j ji 

who, oi a ireezmg day, will plant them- 
selves directly between you and the fire, and then 
stand and argue to prove that selfishness is the 
root of all moral evil. Simeon said he always 
had thought so ; and his neighbors sometimes 
supposed that nobody could enjoy better experi- 
mental advantages for understanding the subject. 
He was one of those men who suppose themselves 
submissive to the divine will, to the uttermost 
extent demanded by the extreme theology of 
that day, simply because they have no nerves to 
feel, no imagination to conceive, what endless 
happiness or suffering is, and who deal therefore 
with the great question of the salvation or dam- 
nation of myriads as a problem of theological 
algebra, to be worked out by their inevitable 
X, y, z. 

Sensitive- A generous, upright nature is always 
blame. more sensitive to blame than another, — 
sensitive in proportion to the amount of 
its reverence for good. 



66 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Depression It IS a hard condition of our existence 
tation. " that every exaltation must have its de- 
pression. God will not let us have 
heaven here below, but only such glimpses and 
faint showings as parents sometimes give to chil- 
dren, when they show them beforehand the jewelry 
and pictures and stores of rare and curious trea- 
sures which they hold for the possession of their 
riper years. So it very often happens that the 
man who has gone to bed an angel, feeling as if 
all sin were forever vanquished, and he himself 
immutably grounded in love, may wake the next 
morning with a sick-headache, and, if he be not 
careful, may scold about his breakfast like a mis- 
erable sinner. 

French True Frenchwoman as she was, always 

nature. . . , , . „ « , 

m one rambow shimmer ot lancy and 
feeling, like one of those cloud-spotted April 
days, which give you flowers and rain, sun and 
shadow, and snatches of bird-singing, all at once. 

Simple He is One of those great, honest fellows, 
woridii^^^' without the smallest notion of the world 
ness. ^g |-^g -jj^ ^jjQ think, in dealing with 

men, that you must go to work and prove the 
right or the wrong of a matter ; just as if any- 
body cared for that ! Supposing he is right, — 
which appears very probable to me, — what is 
he going to do about it ? No moral argument, 
since the world began, ever prevailed over twenty- 
five per cent, profit. 



HUMAN NATURE. 57 

Duty p. "Madam," said the doctor, "I 'd sooner 
ency. my System should be sunk in the sea 

than that it should be a millstone round 
my neck to keep me from my duty. Let God 
take care of my theology ; I must do my duty." 

Joy of There are some people so evidently 
^^"^' broadly and heartily of this world that 
their coming into a room always materializes the 
conversation. We wish to be understood that 
we mean no disparaging reflection on such per- 
sons ; they are as necessary to make up a world 
as cabbages to make up a garden ; the great, 
healthy principles of cheerfulness and animal 
life seem to exist in them in the gross ; they are 
wedges and ingots of solid, contented vitality. 

A boy'a " Oh, you go 'long, Massa Marvin ; 
^'^ ' ye '11 live to count dat ar' boy for de 
staff o' yer old age yit, now I tell ye ; got de 
makin' o' ten or 'nary men in him ; kittles dat 's 
full allers will bile over ; good yeast will blow at 
de cork, — lucky ef it don't bust de bottle. Tell 
ye, der 's angels hes der hooks in sich, an' when 
de Lord wants him, dey '11 haul him in safe an* 
sound." 



Will- " Law me ! what 's de use ? I 'se set out 

power. ^^ b'liebe de Catechize, an' I 'se gwine 
to b'liebe it, so ! " 



The ^ " But, Marie, how unjust is the world ! 
injustice, how unjust both in praise and blame." 



58 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



OLDTOWN FOLKS. 

Selfish These dear, good souls who wear their 
life out for you, have they not a right 
to scold you, and dictate to you, and tie up your 
liberty, and make your life a burden to you ? If 
they have not, who has ? If you complain, you 
break their worthy old hearts. They insist on 
the privilege of seeking your happiness by 
thwarting you in everything you want to do, and 
putting their will instead of yours in every step 
of your life. 

Expressive Aunt Lois, as I have often said before, 
was a good Christian, and held it her 
duty to govern her tongue. True, she said many 
sharp and bitter things ; but nobody but herself 
and her God knew how many more she would 
have said had she not reined herself up in con- 
scientious silence. But never was there a woman 
whose silence could express more contempt and 
displeasure than hers. You could feel it in the 
air about you, though she never said a word. 
You could feel it in the rustle of her dress, in 
the tap of her heels over the floor, in the occa- 
sional flash of her sharp black eye. She was 
like a thunder-cloud, whose quiet is portentous, 
and from which you every moment expect a flash 
or an explosion. 



HUMAN NATURE. 69 

Power of That kind of tone which sounds so 
much like a blow that one dodges one's 
head involuntarily. 

Makingthe " There 's no use in such talk, Lois : 
what 's done 's done ; and if the Lord 
let it be done, we may. We can't always make 
people do as we would. There 's no use in being 
dragged through the world like a dog under a 
cart, hanging back and yelping. What we must 
do, we may as weU do willmgly, — as well walk 
as be dragged." 

Influence It is Strange that no human being grows 
SyaMas- "P "^^^o docs not SO intertwist in his 
Bociation. growth the whole idea and spirit of his 
day, that rightly to dissect out his history would 
require one to cut to pieces and analyze society, 
law, religion, the metaphysics, and the morals of 
his time ; and, as all things run back to those of 
past days, the problem is still further compli- 
cated. The humblest human being is the sum 
total of a column of figures which go back 
through centuries before he was born. 

Personal Supposing a man is made like an organ, 
magne - ^j^j^ ^^^ ^^ three banks of keys, and 



ism, 



ever so many stops, so that he can 
play all sorts of tunes on himself ; is it being a 
hypocrite with each person to play precisely the 
tune, and draw out exactly the stop, which he 
knows will make himself agreeable and further 
his purpose ? 



60 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Physical That charming gift of physical good 
humor. humor, which is often praised as a vir- 
tue in children and in grown people, 
but which is a mere condition of the animal 
nature. 



SAM LAWSON's stories. 

Effect of "Ye know sinnin' will always make a 
Buinmg. ^^^ leave prayin'." 

Scepti- "You look at the folks that 's allers 
tellin' you what they don't believe, — 
they don't believe this, an' they don't believe that, 
— an' what sort o' folks is they ? Why, like yer 
Aunt Lois, sort o' stringy an' dry. There ain't 
no 'sorption got out o' not belie vin' nothin'." 

Life. " That 'are 's jest the way folks go all 

their lives, boys. It 's all fuss, fuss, and stew, 
stew, till ye get somewhere ; an' then it 's fuss, 
fuss, an' stew, stew, to get back again ; jump here 
an' scratch your eyes out, an' jump there an' 
scratch 'em in again, — that 'are 's life." 



PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND. 



Life as a There are those people who possess a 
peculiar faculty of mingling in the af- 
fairs of this life as spectators as well as actors. 



HUMAN NATURE. 61 

It does not, of course, suppose any coldness of 
nature or want of human interest or sympathy, 
— nay, it often exists more completely with 
people of the tenderest human feeling. It rather 
seems to be a kind of distinct faculty working 
harmoniously with all the others ; but he who 
possesses it needs never to be at a loss for inter- 
est or amusement ; he is always a spectator at 
a tragedy or a comedy, and sees in real life a 
humor and a pathos beyond anything he can find 
shadowed in books. 

AchUd- Mrs. Pennel had one of those natures, 
■ gentle, trustful, and hopeful, because not 
very deep ; she was one of the little children of 
the world, whose faith rests on childlike igno- 
ranee, and who know not the deeper needs of 
deeper natures ; such see only the sunshine, and 
forget the storm. 

Unintend- All that there was developed of him, at 

ed hurts. , p i c ,„ 

present, was a fund of energy, self- 
esteem, hope, courage, and daring, the love of 
action, life, and adventure ; his life was in the 
outward and present, not in the inward and re- 
flective ; he was a true ten-year-old boy, in its 
healthiest and most animal perfection. What 
she was, the small pearl with the golden hair, 
with her frail and high-strung organization, her 
sensitive nerves, her half-spiritual fibres, her pon- 
derings, and marvels, and dreams, her power of 
love and yearning for self-devotion, our reader 



62 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

may, perhaps, have seen. But if ever two chil- 
dren, or two grown people, thus organized, are 
thrown into intimate relations, it follows, from 
the very laws of their being, that one must hurt 
the other, simply by being itself ; one must al- 
ways hunger for what the other has not to give. 

Real love. " I always thought that my wife must 
be one of the sort of women who pray." 

"And why?" said Mara, in surprise. 

" Because I need to be loved a great deal, and 
it is only that kind who pray who know how to 
love really.''^ 

LITTLE rOXES» 

Difficulty It is astonishing how much we think 
knowledge, about ourselves, yet to how little pur- 
pose ; how very clever people will talk 
and wonder about themselves and each other, not 
knowing how to use either themselves or each 
other, — not having as much practical philosophy 
in the matter of their own character and that of 
their friends as they have in respect to the screws 
of their gas-fixtures or the management of their 
water-pipes. 

Reserve There are in every family circle indi- 

not under- • i i i , • «! • r 

stood. V] duals whom a certam sensitiveness oi 

nature inclines to quietness and reserve ; 

and there are very well-meaning families where 

no such quietness and reserve is possible. No- 



HUMAN NATURE. 63 

body can be let alone, nobody may have a secret, 
nobody can move in any direction, without a host 
of inquiries and comments : " Who is your letter 
from ? Let 's see." — " My letter is from So- 
and-so." — "He writing to you! I didn't 
know that. What 's he writing about ? " — 
" Where did you go yesterday ? What did you 
buy ? What did you give for it ? What are 
you going to do with it ? " — " Seems to me 
that 's an odd way to do. I should n't do so." 
— " Look here, Mary ; Sarah 's going to have a 
dress of silk tissue this spring. Now I think 
they 're too dear, don't you ? " 

I recoUect seeing in some author a description 
of a true gentleman, in which, among other 
things, he was characterized as the man that asks 
the fewest questions. This trait of refined so- 
ciety might be adopted into home-life in a far 
greater degree than it is, and make it far more 
agreeable. 

If there is perfect unreserve and mutual con- 
fidence, let it show itself in free communications 
coming unsolicited. It may fairly be pre- 
sumed that, if there is anything our intimate 
friends wish us to know, they will tell us of it, 
and that when we are in close and confidential 
terms with persons, and there are topics on which 
they do not speak to us, it is because for some 
reason they prefer to keep silence concerning 
them ; and the delicacy that respects a friend's 
silence is one of the charms of Hfe. 



64 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Shyness of It comes far easier to scold our friend 
in an angry moment than to say how 
much we love, honor, and esteem him in a kindly 
mood. "Wrath and bitterness speak themselves 
and go with their own force ; love is shame-faced, 
looks shyly out of the window, lingers long at the 
door-latch. 

Throwing For the Contentions that loosen the very 
nes? ^^^' foundations of love, that crumble away 
all its fine traceries and carved work, 
about what miserable, worthless things do they 
commonly begin ! A dinner underdone, too much 
oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal 
or soap, a dish broken ! — and for this miserable 
sort of trash, very good, very generous, very re- 
ligious people will sometimes waste and throw 
away by double-handfuls the very thing for 
which houses are built and all the paraphernalia 
of a home established, — their happi7iess. Better 
cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt meat, better any 
inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of love ; and 
nothing so surely turns away love as constant 
fault-finding. 

Morbid There is fretfulness, a mizzling, driz- 
ee mgs. ^ling rain of discomforting remark ; there 
is grumbling, a northeast snowstorm that never 
clears ; there is scolding, the thunder-storm with 
lightning and hail. All these are worse than 
useless ; they are positive sins, by whomsoever 
indulged, — sins as great and real as many that 



HUMAN NATURE. 65 

are shuddered at in polite society. All these are 
for the most part but the venting on our fellow- 
beings of morbid feelings resulting from dyspep- 
sia, over-taxed nerves, or general ill-health. 



HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS. 

Love of a Milton says that the love of fame is the 
bargain. j^^^ infirmity of noble minds. I think 
he had not rightly considered the subject. I 
believe that last infirmity is the love of getting 
things cheap ! Understand me, now. I don't 
mean the love of getting cheap things, by which 
one understands showy, trashy, ill-made, spurious 
articles, bearing certain apparent resemblances to 
better things. All really sensible people are 
quite superior to that sort of cheapness. But 
those fortunate accidents which put within the 
power of a man things really good and valuable 
for half or a third of their value, what mortal 
virtue and resolution can withstand ? 

Warning Mothers who throw away the key of 
formoth- ^j^g.j. ^ji^ii^jren's hearts in childhood 
sometimes have a sad retribution. As 
the children never were considered when they 
were little and helpless, so they do not consider 
when they are strong and powerful. 

Careful ob- I think the best things on all subjects in 

servation. ^^-^ ^^^^^ ^f ^^^.g ^^^ g^^^J^ ^ot by the 

practical workers, but by the careful observers. 



66 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



THE CHIMNEY COKNER. 

Looking Friend Theophilus was born on the 
blue glasses, shady side of Nature, and endowed by 
his patron saint with every grace and 
gift which can make a human creature worthy 
and available, except the gift of seeing the bright 
side of things. His bead-roll of Christian vir- 
tues includes all the graces of the spirit except 
hope ; and so, if one wants to know exactly the 
flaw, the defect, the doubtful side, and to take 
into account all the untoward possibilities of 
any person, place, or thing, he had best apply to 
friend Theophilus. He can tell you just where 
and how the best-laid scheme is likely to 
fail, just the screw that will fall loose in the 
smoothest working machinery, just the flaw in 
the most perfect character, just the defect in the 
best written book, just the variety of thorn that 
must accompany each particular species of rose. 

Chateaux Rudolph is another of the habitues of 
^pagne. our chimney corner, representing the 
order of young knighthood in America, 
and his dreams and fancies, if impracticable, are 
always of a kind to make every one think him a 
good fellow. He who has no romantic dreams 
at twenty-one will be a horribly dry peascod at 
fifty ; therefore it is that I gaze reverently at 
aU Kudolph's chateaux in Spain, which want 
nothing to complete them except solid earth to 
stand on. 



HUMAN NATURE. 67 

Care in- The fact is that care and labor are as 
human^n^ much Correlated to human existence as 
ture. shadow is to light : there is no such 

thing as excluding them from any mortal lot. 
You may make a canary-bird or a gold-fish live 
in absolute contentment without a care or labor, 
but a human being you cannot. Human beings 
are restless and active in their very nature, and 
will do something, and that something will prove 
a care, a labor, and a fatigue, arrange it how you 
will. As long as there is anything to be desired 
and not yet attained, so long its attainment will 
be attempted; so long as that attainment is 
doubtful or difficult, so long will there be care 
and anxiety. 



THE MAYFLOWER. 



ness.' 



Cute- He possessed a great share of that char- 
acteristic national trait so happily de- 
nominated " cuteness," which signifies an ability 
to do everything without trying, to know every- 
thing without learning, and to make more use of 
one's ignorance than other people do of their 
knowledge. 

Making It Sometimes goes a great way towards 
peope e jjjg^jjjjjg people like us to take it for 
granted that they do already. 

A common She therefore repeated over exactly 
SasoiSng. what she said before, only in a much 



68 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

louder tone of voice, and with much more vehe- 
ment forms of asseveration, — a mode of reason- 
ing which, if not entirely logical, has at least the 
sanction of very respectable authorities among 
the enlightened and learned. 

Danger in There is no point in the history of ^ re- 
apparent p .,1 . ... .-,.'., 
safety. lorm, either m communities or individ- 
uals, so dangerous as that where danger 
seems entirely past. As long as a man thinks 
his health failing, he watches, he diets, and will 
undergo the most heroic self-denial ; but let him 
once set himself down as cured, and how readily 
does he fall back to one soft, indulgent habit 
after another, all tending to ruin everything that 
he has before done ! 

Seif-decep. How strange that a man may appear 
doomed, given up, and lost, to the eye 
of every looker-on, before he begins to suspect 
himself ! 



Convenient What would people do if the convenient 
shelter of duty did not afford them a 
retreat in cases where they are disposed to change 
their minds ? 



Too much A man can sometimes become an old 
bachelor because he has too much heart, 
as well as too little. 



Privileged Thesc privileged truth-teUers are quite a 
tellers. necessary of life to young ladies in the 



HUMAN NATURE. 69 

full tide of society, and we really think it would 
be worth while for every dozen of them to unite 
to keep a person of this kind on a salary for the 
benefit of the whole. 

Two kinds There is one kind of frankness which is 
of frank- .^^ result of perfect unsuspiciousness, 

IX6SSa •*■ |» • 

and which requires a measure ot igno- 
rance of the world and of life ; this kind appeals 
to our generosity and tenderness. There is an- 
other which is the frankness of a strong but 
pure mind, acquainted with life, clear in its dis- 
crimination and upright in its intention, yet above 
disguise or concealment; this kind excites re- 
spect. The first seems to proceed simply from 
impulse, the second from impulse and reflection 
united; the first proceeds, in a measure, from 
ignorance, the second from knowledge ; the first 
is born from an undoubting confidence in others, 
the second from a virtuous and well-grounded 
reliance on one's self. 



PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY. 

Genial and There are people who, wherever they 
^iSvl^ move, freeze the hearts of those they 
touch, and chill all demonstration of 
feeling; and there are warm natures, that 
unlock every fountain, and bid every feeling 
gush forth. 



70 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Power of " Oh, nonsense ! now, John, don't talk 
^^^ ^' humbug. I 'd like to see you following 
goodness when beauty is gone. I 've known lots 
of plain old maids that were perfect saints and 
angels j yet men crowded and jostled by them to 
get at the pretty sinners. I dare say now," she 
added, with a bewitching look over her shoulder 
at him, " you 'd rather have me than Miss Almira 
Carraway, — had n't you, now ? " 

Grovping " The thing with you men," said Grace, 
"is that you want your wives to see 
with your eyes, all in a minute, what has got to 
come with years and intimacy, and the gradual 
growing closer and closer together. The hus- 
band and wife, of themselves, drop many friend- 
ships and associations that at first were mutually 
distasteful, simply because their tastes have grown 
insensibly to be the same." 



DEACON PITKIN S FARM. 

A New Diana Pitkin was like some of the fruits 
woman. of her native hills, full of juices which 
tend to sweetness in maturity, but which, 
when not quite ripe, have a pretty decided dash 
of sharpness. There are grapes that require a 
frost to ripen them, and Diana was somewhat 
akin to these. 



HUMAN NATURE. 71 



AGNES OF SORRENTO. 

Acceptable Then he had given her advice which 
^^®' exactly accorded with her own views ; 
and such advice is always regarded as an emi- 
nent proof of sagacity in the giver. 

Dual But, reviewing his interior world, and 

na ure. taking a survey of the work before him, 
he felt that sense of a divided personality which 
often becomes so vivid in the history of individ- 
uals of strong will and passion. It seemed to 
him that there were two men within him : the 
one turbulent, passionate, demented ; the other 
vainly endeavoring, by authority, reason, and 
conscience, to bring the rebel to subjection. 
The discipline of conventual life, the extraordi- 
nary austerities to which he had condemned him- 
self, the monotonous solitude of his existence, all 
tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous sys- 
tem, which in the Italian constitution is at all 
times disproportionately developed ; and when 
those weird harp-strings of the nerves are once 
thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of 
the discord sometimes utterly bewilders the most 
practiced self-government. 

Power of " Son, it is ever so," replied the monk. 

characte^r. " If there be a man that cares neither 

for duke nor emperor, but for God 

alone, then dukes and emperors will give more 



72 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

for his good word than for a whole dozen of 
common priests." 

Relation of " We old f olks are twisted and crabbed 
youth. and full of knots with disappointment 
and trouble, like the mulberry-trees that 
they keep for vines to run on." 



UNCLE TOM S CABIN. 

Persis- " Dis ycr matter 'bout persistence, fel- 
ler-niggers," said Sam, with the air of 
one entering into an abstruse subject, " dis yer 
'sistency 's a thing what ain't seed into very clar 
by most anybody. Now, yer see, when a feller 
stands up for a thing one day and night, de con- 
trar' de next, folks ses (an' naturally enough dey 
ses), Why, he ain't persistent — hand me dat ar' 
bit o' corn-cake, Andy. But let 's look inter it. I 
hope the gent'lmen and de fair sex will scuse my 
usin' an or 'nary sort o' 'parison. Here ! I 'm a 
tryin' to get top o' der hay. Wal, I puts up my 
larder dis yer side ; 't ain't no go ; — den, 'cause 
I don't try dere no more, but puts my larder 
right de contrar' side, ain't I persistent ? I 'm 
persistent in wantin' to get up which ary side 
my larder is ; don't ye see, all on ye ? " 

The negro The negro, it must be remembered, is 

beauty. an exotic of the most gorgeous and 

superb countries of the world, and he 



HUMAN NATURE. 73 

has, deep in his heart, a passion for all that is 
splendid, rich, and fanciful ; a passion which, 
rudely indulged by an untrained taste, draws on 
him the ridicule of the colder and more correct 
white race. 



Effect of The ear that has never heard anything 

harshness, i ■ i • . i • i i p 

but abuse is strangely incredulous ot 
anything so heavenly as kindness. 



"Blessings Marie was one of those unfortunately 
they take ^ constituted mortals, in whose eyes what- 
mgw." ^^^^ i^ ^^^^ ^^^ gone assumes a value 
which it never had in possession. 
Whatever she had she seemed to survey only 
to pick flaws in it ; but once fairly away, there 
was no end to her valuation of it. 



DRED. 

Speaking " Now, Miss Nina, I want to speak as 

as a friend. n . ■• ,, 

a iriend. 
" No, you sha'n't ; it is just what people say 
when they are going to say something disagree- 
able. I told Clayton, once for all, that I would 
n't have him speak as a friend to me." 

'Senses. " Ah, lots of 'scuses I keeps ! I tell 
you now, 'scuses is excellent things. Why, 'senses 
is like dis yer grease dat keeps de wheels from 
screaking. Lord bless you, de whole world 



74 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

turns 'round on 'senses. Whar de world be if 
everybody was such fools to tell de raal reason 
for every ting they are gwine for to do, or ain't 
gwine for to ! " 

Use of a Every kind of creature has its uses, and 
box. there are times when a lively, unthink- 

ing chatterbox is a perfect godsend. 
Those unperceiving people who never notice the 
embarrassment of others, and who walk with the 
greatest facility into the gaps of conversation, 
simply because they have no perception of any 
difficulty there, have their hour ; and Nina felt 
positively grateful to Mr. Carson for the contin- 
uous and cheerful rattle which had so annoyed 
her the day before. 

Good and It is our fatality that everything that 
arabie!"^^ does good must do harm. It is the con- 
dition of our poor, imperfect life here. 

♦' streaked " But den, you see, honey, der 's some 
^^^' folks der 's two men in 'em, — one is a 

good one, and t'oder is very bad. Wal, dis yer 
was jest dat sort. . . . He was one of dese yer 
streaked men, dat has drefful ugly streaks ; and, 
some of dem times, de Lord only knows what he 
won't do." 

First steps. There is something in the first essay 
of a young man, in any profession, like the first 
launching of a ship, which has a never-ceasing 
hold on human sympathies. 



HUMAN NATURE. 75 

Fromdif- There is no study in human nature 
stand- more interesting than the aspects of the 
^°^^ ^" same subject seen in the points of view 
of different characters. One might almost imag- 
ine that there were no such thing as absolute 
truth, since a change of situation or tempera- 
ment is capable of changing the whole force of 
an argument. 

Fine na- As good wine makcs the strongest vine- 
vertecL^^ gar, SO fine nature perverted makes the 
worst vice. 



SUNNY MEMORIES OP FOREIGN LANDS. 

Lost confi- There are some people who involve in 
themselves so many of the elements 
which go to make up our confidence in human 
nature generally, that to lose confidence in them 
seems to undermine our faith in human virtue. 

Wit. Truly, wit, like charity, covers a mul- 

titude of sins. A man who has the faculty of 
raising a laugh in this sad, earnest world is 
remembered with indulgence and complacency. 

Value of But SO it always is. The man who has 

ready ex- ..,.«,« . « 

pressicn. exquisite giits 01 expression passes tor 
more, popularly, than the man with 
great and grand ideas, who utters but imper- 
fectly. 



76 FLOWEKS AND FKUIT. 



POGANUC PEOPLE. 

Opinion- Miss Debby was one of those human 
pie. ^^^' beings who carry with them the apology 
for their own existence. It took but a 
glance to see that she was one of those forces of 
nature which move always in straight lines, and 
which must be turned out for if one wishes to 
avoid a colhsion. All Miss Debby's opinions 
had been made up, catalogued, and arranged at 
a very early period of life, and she had no 
thought of change. She moved in a region of 
certainties, and always took her own opinions for 
granted with a calm supremacy altogether above 
reason. Yet there was all the while about her 
a twinkle of humorous consciousness, a vein of 
original drollery, which gave piquancy to the 
brusqueness of her manner, and prevented people 
from taking offence. 

Difficulty It is curious that men are not generally 

of confes- i t p r £ j.t_ 

sion. ashamed oi any torm oi anger, wrath, 

or malice ; but of the first step towards 
a nobler nature, — the confession of a wrong, — 
they are ashamed. 



LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW. 



Animal When people work hard all day, and 
spin s. Jiave a good digestion, it is not necessary 



HUMAN NATURE. 77 

that a thing should be very funny to make them 
laugh tremendously. 

First false Boys, and men too, sometimes, by a 
^ ^^' single step, and that step taken in a 

sudden hurry of inconsideration, get into a net- 
work of false positions, in which they are very 
uneasy and unhappy, but live along from day to 
day seeing no way out. 



QUEER LITTLE PEOPLE. 

Marks of " Depend upon it, my dear," said Mrs. 
gemus. Nut-cracker, solemnly, " that fellow must 
be a genius." 

" Fiddlestick on his genius ! " said old Mr. 
Nut-cracker ; " what does he do ? " 

" Oh, nothing, of course ; that 's one of the first 
marks of genius. Geniuses, you know, never 
can come down to common life." 

A busy- Old Mother Magpie was about the busi- 
° ^' est character in the forest. But you 

must know that there is a great difference be- 
tween being busy and being industrious. One 
may be very busy all the time, and yet not in the 
least industrious ; and this was the case with 
Mother Magpie. 

She was always full of everybody's business 
but her own, — up and down, here and there, 
everywhere but in her own nest, knowing every 



78 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

one's affairs, telling what everybody had been 
doing or ought to do, and ready to cast her ad- 
vice gratis at every bird and beast of the woods. 



A DOG S MISSION. 

Broken Do you, my brother, or grown-up sister, 
ever do anything like this ? Do your 
friendships and loves ever go the course of our 
Charley's toy ? First, enthusiasm ; second, sati- 
ety ; third, discontent ; then picking to pieces ; 
then dropping and losing ! How many idols are 
in your box of by-gone playthings ? And may it 
not be as well to suggest to you, when you find 
flaws in your next one, to inquire before you pick 
to pieces whether you can put together again, or 
whether what you call defect is not a part of its 
nature ? A tin locomotive won't draw a string 
of parlor chairs, by any possible alteration, but it 
may be very pretty for all that it was made for. 
Charley and you might both learn something 
from this. 

MY WIFE AlO) I. 

Soul-Ian- " There are people in this world who 
guage. (ion't understand each other's vernac- 
ular. Papa and I could no more discuss any 
question of the inner life together than if he 
spoke Chickasaw and I spoke French." 



HUMAN NATURE. 79 

Characters It is a charming thing, in one's rambles, 

worth ex- . , n 

pioring. to come across a tree, or a tlower, or a 
fine bit of landscape that we can think 
of afterwards, and feel richer for its being in 
the world. But it is more, when one is in a 
strange place, to come across a man that you feel 
thoroughly persuaded is, somehow or other, 
morally and intellectually worth exploring. Our 
lives tend to become so hopelessly commonplace, 
and the human beings we meet are generally so 
much one just like another, that the possibility 
of a new and peculiar style of character in an 
acquaintance is a most enlivening one. 

Unsuspect- The man who has begun to live and 
® ^'^ser. ^Qj.], -^y artificial stimulant never 
knows where he stands, and can never count upon 
himself with any certainty. , He lets into his 
castle a servant who becomes the most tyrannical 
of masters. He may resolve to turn him out, 
but will find himself reduced to the condition in 
which he can neither do with nor without him. 

In short, the use of stimulant to the brain 
power brings on a disease in whose paroxysms a 
man is no more his own master than in the rav- 
ings of fever, a disease that few have the knowl- 
edge to understand, and for whose manifestations 
the world has no pity. 

Heredity. Out of every ten young men who begin 
the use of stimulants as a social exhilaration, 
there are perhaps five in whose breast lies coiled 



80 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

up and sleeping this serpent, destined in after 
years to be the deadly tyrant of their life — this 
curse, unappeasable by tears, or prayers, or 
agonies — with whom the struggle is like that of 
Laocoon with the hideous python, yet songs and 
garlands and poetry encircle the wine-cup, and 
ridicule and contumely are reserved for him who 
fears to touch it. 

Personality. "We are all familiar with the fact that 
there are some people who, let them sit still as 
they may, and conduct themselves never so 
quietly, nevertheless impress their personality on 
those around them, and make their presence felt. 



WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS. 

Friendly A great deal of good sermonizing, by 
gossip, ^_^^ way, is expended on gossip, which 
is denounced as one of the seven deadly sins of 
society ; but, after all, gossip has its better side ; 
if not a Christian grace, it certainly is one of 
those weeds which show a good warm soil. 

The kindly heart, that really cares for every- 
thing liuman it meets, inclines toward gossi]D in a 
good way. Just as a morning-glory throv/s out 
tendrils, and climbs up and peeps cheerily into 
your window, so a kindly gossip can't help watch- 
ing the opening and shutting of your blinds, and 
the curling smoke from your chimney. 



HUMAN NATURE. 81 

Persist- If you Will have your own way, and 
^^^^' persist in it, people have to make up 

with you. 

Right side Human nature is always interesting:, if 

of human ,..,., ° 

nature. One takes it right side out. 

Human It is rather amusing to a general looker- 
on ill this odd world of ours to contrast 
the serene, cheerful good faith with which these 
constitutionally active individuals go about criti- 
cising, and suggesting, and directing right and 
left, with the dismay and confusion of mind they 
leave behind them wherever they operate. 

They are often what the world calls well- 
meaning people, animated by a most benevolent 
spirit, and have no more intention of giving 
offence than a nettle has of stinging. A large, 
vigorous, well-growing nettle has no consciousness 
of the stings it leaves in the delicate hands that 
have been in contact with it ; it has simply acted 
out its innocent and respectable nature as a 
nettle. But a nettle armed with the power of 
locomotion on an ambulatory tour, is something 
the results of which may be fearful to contem- 
plate. 

Flaws in Ideal heroes are not plentiful, and there 
^^^^' are few gems that don't need rich set- 
ting. 



82 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

impossi- People who hate trouble generally get a 
evading good deal of it. It 's all very well for a 
g^^tle, acquiescent spirit to be carried 
through life by one bearer. But when half a 
dozen bearers quarrel and insist on carrying one 
opposite ways, the more facile the spirit, the 
greater the trouble. 

Righteous- Perhaps there is never a time when 
through re- man or woman has a better chance, with 
pen anoe. gu{t;a]3ie help, of building a good charac- 
ter, than just after a humiliating fall which has 
taught the sinner his own weakness, and given 
him a sad experience of the bitterness of sin. 

Nobody wants to be sold under sin, and go the 
whole length in iniquity ; and when one has gone 
just far enough in wrong living to perceive 
in advance all its pains and penalties, there is 
often an agonized effort to get back to respect- 
ability, like the clutching of the drowning man 
for the shore. The waters of death are cold and 
bitter, and nobody wants to be drowned. 

"I told "Whence is the feeling of satisfaction 
you so. -v^hich we have when things that we al- 
ways said we knew turn out just as we predicted ? 
Had we really rather our neighbor would be 
proved a thief and a liar than to be proved in 
a mistake ourselves ? Would we be willing to 
have somebody topple headlong into destruction 
for the sake of being able to say, 'I told you 
so ' ? " 



HUMAN NATURE. 83 

Gossip. In fact, the gossip plant is like the grain 
of mustard-seed, which, though it be the least of 
all seeds, becometh a great tree, and the fowls of 
the air lodge in its branches, and chatter mightily 
there at all seasons. 



CHAPTER m. 
WOMAN. 

THE MIKESTEK's WOOING. 

Woman as " You girls and women don't know your 
ospe. pQ^ej.^ Why, Mary, you are a living 
Gospel. You have always had a strange power 
over us boys. You never talked religion much, 
but I have seen high fellows come away from 
being with you as stUl and quiet as one feels 
when he goes into a church. I can't understand 
all the hang of predestination and moral ability, 
and natural ability, and God's efficiency, and 
man's agency, which Dr. Hopkins is so en- 
gaged about ; but I can understand you, — you 
can do me good." 

Holiness of " But do you remember you told me 
once that, when the snow first fell, and 
lay so dazzling and pure and soft all about, you 
always felt as if the spreads and window cur- 
tains, that seemed white before, were not clean ? 
Well, it 's just like that with me. Your presence 
makes me feel that I am not pure, — that I am 
low and unworthy, — not worthy to touch the 
hem of your garment. Your good Dr. Hopkins 



WOMAN. 85 

spent a whole half day, the other Sunday, trying 
to tell us about the beauty of holiness ; and he 
cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told 
us what it was n't ; and what was like it, and 
was n't ; and then he built up an exact definition, 
and fortified and bricked it up all round ; and I 
thought to myself that he 'd better tell 'em to 
look at Mary Scudder, and they 'd understand all 
about it." 

Woman en- Do you remember, at Niagara, a little 
man^siove. cataract on the American side, which 
throws its silver, sheeny veil over a cave 
called the Grot of Rainbows ? Whoever stands 
on a rock in that grotto sees himself in the cen- 
tre of a rainbow-circle, above, below, around. 
In like manner, merry, chatty, positive, busy, 
house-wifely Katy saw herself standing in a rain- 
bow-shrine in her lover's inner soul, and liked to 
see herself so. A woman, by-the-bye, must be 
very insensible, who is not moved to come upon 
a higher plane of being herself, by seeing how 
undoubtingly she is insphered in the heart of a 
good and noble man. A good man's faith in 
you, fair lady, if you ever have it, will make 
you better and nobler even before you know it. 

Power of It is Only now and then that a matter- 
of-fact woman is sublimated by a real 
love ; but if she is, it is affecting to see how im- 
possible it is for death to quench it. 



86 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Woman's If women have one weakness more 
marked than another, it is towards ven- 
eration. They are born worshippers. . . . The 
fact is, women are burdened with fealty, faith, 
and reverence, more than they know what to do 
with; they stand like a hedge of sweet-peas, 
throwing out fluttering tendrils everywhere for 
something high and strong to climb by, — and 
when they find it, be it ever so rough in the 
bark, they catch upon it. And instances are not 
wanting of those who have turned away from 
the flattery of admirers to prostrate themselves 
at the feet of a genuine hero who never wooed 
them, except by heroic deeds and the rhetoric of 
a noble life. 

Mother- None of the peculiar developments of 
a°son.°'^ the female nature have a more exquisite 
vitality than the sentiment of a frail, 
delicate, repressed, timid woman, for a strong, 
manly, generous son. There is her ideal ex- 
pressed ; there is the outspeaking and outacting 
of all she trembles to think, yet burns to say or 
do ; here is the hero that shall speak for her, the 
heart into which she has poured hers, and that 
shall give to her tremulous and hidden aspirations 
a strong and victorious expression. " I have 
gotten a Tnan from the Lord," she says to her- 
self, and each outburst of his manliness, his vigor, 
his self-confidence, his superb vitality, fills her 
with a strange, wondering pleasure, and she has 
a secret tenderness and pride even in his wilful- 



WOMAN. 87 

ness and waywardness. . . . First love of wo- 
manhood is something wonderful and mysterious, 
— but in this second love it rises again, idealized 
and refined ; she loves the father and herself 
united and made one in this young heir of life 
and hope. 

Mothers' But even mothers who have married 
Satenei. ^^^ ^^^^ themselves somehow so blend 
a daughter's existence with their own as 
to conceive that she must marry their love and 
not her own. 

Repression. Her large brown eyes had an eager joy 
in them when Mary entered ; but they seemed 
to calm down again, and she received her only 
with that placid, sincere air which was her habit. 
Everything about this woman showed an ardent 
soul, repressed by timidity and by a certain 
dumbness in the faculties of outward expression ; 
but her eyes had, at times, that earnest, appeal- 
ing language which is so pathetic in the silence 
of inferior animals. One sometimes sees such 
eyes, and wonders whether the story they inti- 
mate wiU ever be spoken in mortal language. 

Woman's Ah, that silence ! Do not listen to hear 

instinctive -i • , i i 

silence. whom a woman praises, to know where 
her heart is ! do not ask for whom she 
expresses the most earnest enthusiasm ! but if 
there be one she once knew well whose name she 
never speaks, — if she seems to have an instinct 



88 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

to avoid every occasion of its mention, — if 
when you speak, she drops into silence and 
changes the subject, — why, look there for some- 
thing ! just so, when going through deep mead- 
ow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, 
you may know her nest is not there, but far off, 
under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through 
which she has crept with a silent flutter in her 
spotted breast, to act her pretty little falsehood 
before you. 

Idle talk. When Mrs. Twitchel began to talk, it 
flowed a steady stream, as when one turns a 
faucet, that never ceases running till some hand 
turns it back again. 

Reverence " Who cares ? " Said Candace, — " gen- 

the basis , . • . > n . 

of faith. erate or unregenerate, it s all one to 
me ; I believe a man dat acts as he does. 
Him as stands up for de poor, — him as pleads 
for de weak, — he 's my man. I '11 believe straight 
through any ting he 's a mind to put at me." 

Mothers' Most mothcrs are instinctive philoso- 
johers. No treatise on the laws of 
nervous fluids could have taught Mrs. Scudder a 
better role for this morning, than her tender 
gravity, and her constant expedients to break 
and ripple, by changing employments, that deep, 
deadly undercurrent of thoughts which she feared 
might undermine her child's life. 



WOMAN. 89 



OLDTOWN F0LE:S. 

Woman's It is a man's nature to act, to do, and 
■wlien nothing can be done, to forget. 
It is a woman's nature to hold on to what can 
only torture, and live all her despairs over. 
Women's tears are their meat; men find the 
diet too salt, and won't take it. 

Using " My forte lies in picking knowledge 
now e ge. ^^^ ^^ other folks and using it," said 
Tina, joyously. " Out of the least little bit of 
ore that you dig up, I can make no end of 
gold-leaf." 

Mothers' " Ain't the world hard enough without 
fightin' babies, I want to know ? I hate 
to see a woman that don't want to rock her own 
baby, and is contriving ways all the time to 
shirk the care of it. Why, if all the world was 
that way, there would be no sense in Scriptur'. 
' As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I 
comfort you,' the Bible says, takin' for granted 
that mothers were made to comfort children and 
give them good times when they are little." 

The mother "There 's no saying," said Miss Mehit- 
womanf able, " you never know what you may 
find in the odd corners of an old 
maid's heart, when you fairly look into them. 
There are often unused hoards of maternal affec- 



90 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

tion enougli to set up an orphan asylum ; but it 's 
like iron filings and a magnet, — you must try 
them with a live child, and if there is anything 
in 'em, you 11 find it out. That little object," she 
said, looking over her shoulder at Tina, " made 
an instant commotion in the dust and rubbish of 
my forlorn old garret, brought to light a deal 
that I thought had gone to the moles and the 
bats long ago. She will do me good, I can feel, 
with her little pertnesses, and her airs and fan- 
cies. If you could know how chilly and lone- 
some an old house gets sometimes, particularly in 
autumn, when the equinoctial storm is brewing ! 
A lively child is a godsend, even if she turns the 
whole house topsy-turvy." 

Individ- Tina had one of those rebellious heads 
^* of curls that every breeze takes liberties 
with, and that have to be looked after, and 
watched, and restrained. Esther's satin bands 
of hair could pass through a whirlwind and not 
lose their gloss. It is curious how character 
runs even to the minutest thing, — the very hairs 
of our head are numbered by it, — Esther, 
always and in everything self-poised, thoughtful, 
reflective ; Tina, the child of every wandering 
influence, tremulously alive to every new excite- 
ment, a wind-harp for every air of heaven to 
breathe upon. 

A woman's " The fact is, a man never sees a sub- 
^^^* ject thoroughly till he sees what a 



WOMAN. 91 

woman will think of it, for there is a woman's 
view of every subject, which has a different 
shade from a man's view, and that is what you 
and I have insensibly been absorbing in all our 
course hitherto." 



PEARL OF ORR's ISLAND. 

Neighbor's Duty is never more formidable than 
in uence. y^Yieu shc gcts on the cap and gown of 
a neighbor. 

Reserve. But it was not the little maiden's way to 
speak when anything thwarted or hurt her, but 
rather to fold all her feelings and thoughts in- 
ward, as some insects, with fine gauzy wings, 
draw them under a coat of horny concealment. 

True cour- That kind of innocent hypocrisy which 
^^^' is needed as a staple in the lives of 

women who bridge a thousand awful chasms 
with smUing, unconscious looks, and walk, sing- 
ing and scattering flowers, over abysses of fear, 
when their hearts are dying within them. 



There- Pliable as she was to all outward ap- 
power of pearances, the child had her own still, 
quia ness. j^^-gp^Qj, -^orld, whcre all her little 
notions and opinions stood up, crisp and fresh, 
like flowers that grow in cool, shady places. If 
anybody too rudely assailed a thought or sug- 



92 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

gestion she put forth, she drew it back again into 
this quiet, inner chamber, and went on. Reader, 
there are some women of this habit ; there is no 
independence and pertinacity of opinion like that 
of those seemingly soft, quiet creatures, whom it 
is so easy to silence, and so difficult to convince. 
Mara, little and unformed as she yet was, be- 
longed to the race of those spirits to whom is 
deputed the office of the angel in the Apocalypse, 
to whom was given the golden rod which meas- 
ured the new Jerusalem. Infant though she 
was, she had ever in her hands that invisible 
measuring rod, which she was laying to the 
foundations of all actions and thoughts. There 
may, perhaps, come a time when the saucy boy, 
who now steps so superbly, and predominates so 
proudly in virtue of his physical strength and 
daring, will learn to tremble at the golden meas- 
uring rod held in the hand of a woman. 

Sweetness. " She 's got sweet ways and kind words 
for everybody, and it 's as good as a psalm to 
look at her." 

Woman's No man — especially one that is living 

life within. ■, -, , n ^ tj? 

a rough, busy, out-or-doors lite — can 
form the slightest conception of that veiled and 
secluded life which exists in the heart of a sen- 
sitive woman, whose sphere is narrow, whose 
external diversions are few, and whose mind, 
therefore, acts by a continual introversion upon 
itself. They know nothing how their careless 



WOMAN. 93 

words and actions are pondered and turned again 
in weary, quiet hours of fruitless questioning. 
What did he mean by this ? and what did he 
mean by that ? — while he, the careless buffalo, 
meant nothing, or has forgotten what it was, if 
he did. 

Girls' con- " Come, now, can 't you jest tramp 
Mences. ^^^^ ^^ Pennol's and tell SaUie I want 

her?" 

" Not I, mother. There ain't but two gals in 
two miles square here, an' I ain't a-goin' to be 
the feller to shoo 'em apart. What 's the use o' 
bein' gals, an' young, an' pretty, if they can't get 
together an' talk about their new gowns an' the 
fellers ? That ar 's what gals is for." 

Maternal Her love for Moses had always had in 
woman's it a large admixture of that maternal 
^°^®' and care-taking element, which, in some 

shape or other, qualifies the affection of woman 
to man. 

LITTLE FOXES. 

Tact. Some women are endowed with a tact 

for understanding human nature and guiding it. 
They give a sense of largeness and freedom ; 
they find a place for every one, see at once what 
every one is good for, and are inspired by nature 
with the happy wisdom of not wishing or asking 
of any human being more than that human being 



94 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

was made to give. They have the portion in due 
season for all : a bone for the dog ; catnip for 
the cat ; cuttle-fish and hemp-seed for the bird ; 
a book or review for their bashful literary visitor ; 
lively gossip for thoughtless Miss Seventeen ; 
knitting for grandmamma ; fishing-rods, boats, 
and gunpowder for Young Restless, whose beard 
is just beginning to grow ; — and they never fall 
into pets, because the canary-bird won't relish 
the dog's bone, or the dog eat canary-seed, or 
young Miss Seventeen read old Mr. Sixty's re- 
view, or young Master Restless take delight in 
knitting-work, or old grandmamma feel com- 
placency in guns and gunpowder. 

Again, there are others who lay the founda- 
tions of family life so narrow, straight, and strict, 
that there is room in them only for themselves 
and people exactly like themselves ; and hence 
comes much misery. 

Modern Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, 

saints. i i • • i o 

and sleepmg in ashes as a means ot 
saintship ! there is no need of them in our coun- 
try. Let a woman once look at her domestic 
trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her scourges, 
— - accept them, rejoice in them, smile and be 
quiet, silent, patient, and loving under them, — 
and the convent can teach her no more. She is 
a victorious saint. 



WOMAN. 95 



HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS. 

A help- My wife resembles one of those convex 
^^^^' mirrors I have sometimes seen. Every 

idea I threw out, plain and simple, she reflected 
back upon me in a thousand little glitters and 
twinkles of her own ; she made my crude con- 
ceptions come back to me in such perfectly daz- 
zling performances that I hardly recognized 
them. 

A true How many, morally wearied, wandering, 
^°^^' disabled, are healed and comforted by 
the warmth of a true home ! When a mother 
has sent her son to the temptations of a distant 
city, what news is so glad to her heart as that he 
has found some quiet family where he visits often 
and is made to feel at home ? How many young 
men have good women saved from temptation 
and shipwreck, by drawing them often to the 
sheltered corner by the fireside ! The poor artist 
— the wandering genius who has lost his way in 
this world, and stumbles like a child among hard 
realities, — the many men and women, who, 
while they have houses, have no homes, — see 
from afar, in their distant, bleak life-journey, the 
light of a true home-fire, and if made welcome 
there, warm their stiffened Hmbs, and go forth 
stronger to their pilgrimage. Let those who 
have accomplished this beautiful and perfect 
work of divine art be liberal of its influence. 



96 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Let them not seek to bolt the doors and draw the 
curtains ; for they know not, and will never know 
till the future life, of the good they may do by 
the ministration of this great charity of home. 



THE CHIMNEY CORNER. 

The art of She alone can keep the poetry and 

home-mak- i . n 'itp ^ i J^ • 

ing. beauty ot married lite who has this 

poetry in her soul ; who with energy 
and discretion can throw back and out of sight 
the sordid and disagreeable details which beset 
all human living, and can keep in the foreground 
that which is agreeable ; who has enough know- 
ledge of practical household matters to make 
unskilled and rude hands minister to her culti- 
vated and refined tastes, and constitute her 
skilled brain the guide of unskilled hands. From 
such a home, with such a mistress, no sirens will 
seduce a man, even though the hair grow gray, 
and the merely physical charms of early days 
gradually pass away. The enchantment that was 
about her person alone in the days of courtship 
seems in the course of years to have interfused 
and penetrated the hovie which she has created, 
and which in every detail is only an expression 
of her personality. Her thoughts, her plans, her 
provident care, are everywhere ; and the ho7ne 
attracts and holds by a thousand ties the heart 
which before marriage was held by the woman 
alone. 



WOMAN. 97 



THE MAYFLOWER. 

A perfect " Was she beautiful ? " you ask. I also 

character. mi i j.* ll T£. i 

Will ask you one question : " it an angel 
from heaven should dwell in human form, and 
animate any human face, would not that face be 
lovely ? It might not be beautiful^ but would it 
not be lovely ? " She was not beautiful except 
after this fashion. 

How well I remember her, as she used some- 
times to sit thinking, with her head resting on 
her hand, her face mild and placid, with a quiet 
October sunshine in her blue eyes, and an ever- 
present smile over her whole countenance. I 
remember the sudden sweetness of look when 
any one spoke to her ; the prompt attention, the 
quick comprehension of things before you uttered 
them, the obliging readiness to leave for you 
whatever she was doing. 

To those who mistake occasional pensiveness 
for melancholy, it might seem strange to say that 
my Aunt Mary was always happy. Yet she was 
so. Her spirits never rose to buoyancy, and 
never sunk to despondency. I know that it is 
an article in the sentimental confession of faith 
that such a character cannot be interesting. For 
this impression there is some ground. The pla- 
cidity of a medium, commonplace mind is unin- 
teresting, but the placidity of a strong and well 
governed one borders on the sublime. Mutability 
of emotion characterizes inferior orders of being ; 



98 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

but He who combines all interest, all excitement, 
all perfection, is "the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever." And if there be anything sublime in the 
idea of an Almighty Mind, in perfect peace itself, 
and, therefore, at leisure to bestow all its ener- 
gies on the wants of others, there is at least a re- 
flection of the same sublimity in the character of 
that human being who has so quieted and gov- 
erned the world within that nothing is left to 
absorb sympathy or distract attention from those 
around. 

Such a woman was my Aunt Mary. Her 
placidity was not so much the result of tempera- 
ment as of choice. She had every susceptibility 
of suffering incident to the noblest and most 
delicate constitution of mind ; but they had been 
so directed that, instead of concentrating thought 
on self, they had prepared her to understand and 
feel for others. 

She was, beyond all things else, a sympathetic 
person, and her character, like the green in a 
landscape, was less remarkable for what it was 
in itself than for its perfect and beautiful har- 
mony with all the coloring and shading around 
it. 

Other women have had talents, others have 
been good ; but no woman that ever I knew 
possessed goodness and talent in union with such 
an intuitive perception of feelings, and such a 
faculty of instantaneous adaptation to them. The 
most troublesome thing in this world is to be 
condemned to the society of a person who can 



WOMAN. 99 

never understand anything you say unless you 
say the whole of it, making your commas and 
periods as you go along ; and the most desirable 
thing in the world is to live with a person who 
saves you all the trouble of talking by knowing 
just what you mean before you begin to speak. 

Woman's " That word delicacy is a charming 
fluence. ' cover-all in all these cases, Florence. 
Now, here is a fine, noble-spirited young 
man, away from his mother and sisters, away 
from any family friend who might care for him, 
tempted, betrayed, almost to ruin, and a few 
words from you, said as a woman knows how to 
say them, might be his salvation. But you will 
coldly look on and see him go to destruction, 
because you have too much delicacy to make the 
effort — like the man that would not help his 
neighbor out of the water because he had never 
had the honor of an introduction." 

" But, Edward, consider how peculiarly fastid- 
ious Elliot is — how jealous of any attempt to 
restrain and guide him." 

" And just for that reason it is that men of 
his acquaintance cannot do anything with him. 
But what are you women made with so much 
tact and power of charming for, if it is not to do 
these very things that we cannot do ? It is a 
delicate matter — true ; and has not Heaven 
given to you a fine touch and a fine eye for just 
such delicate matters ? Have you not seen, a 
thousand times, that what might be resented as 



100 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

an impertinent interference on the part of a man 
comes to us as a flattering expression of interest 
from the lips of a woman ? " 



PINK AKD WHITE TYKAITNY. 

Selfishness. That kind of woman can't love. They 
are like cats, that want to be stroked and ca- 
ressed, and to be petted, and to lie soft and 
warm ; and they will purr to any one that will 
pet them, — that 's all. As for love that leads 
to any self-sacrifice, they don't begin to know 
anything about it. 

Intuition. Now Grace had that perfect intuitive 
knowledge of just what the matter was with her 
brother that women always have who have grown 
up in intimacy with a man. These fine female 
eyes see farther between the rough cracks and 
ridges of the oak-bark of manhood than men 
themselves. 

DEACON Pitkin's fakm. 

The New Ncw England had of old times, and has 
wife- still, perhaps, in her farm-houses, these 

mother. in . j 

women who seem rrom year to year to 
develop in the spiritual sphere as the bodily form 
shrinks and fades. While the cheek grows thin 
and the form spare, the will-power grows daily 
stronger ; though the outer man perish, the inner 



WOMAN. 101 

man is renewed day by day. The worn hand 
that seems so weak yet holds every thread and 
controls every movement of the most complex 
family life, and wonders are daily accomplished 
by the presence of a woman who seems little 
more than a spirit. The New England wife- 
mother was the one little jeweled pivot on which 
all the wheel-work of the family moved. 



Suppres- It was not the first time that, wounded 
^''^''' by a loving hand in this dark struggle 

of life, she had suppressed the pain of her own 
hurt, that he that had wounded her might the 
better forgive himself. 



AGNES OF SORRENTO. 

True "A beautiful face is a kind of psalm 

beauty. ^]jich makes one want to be good." 

Forcing a " After all, sistor, what need of haste ? 

daughter. ,^ .^ ^ ^^^^^ ^j^^ ^^^^ ^j^^ ^^^^ ^^ 

out of the nest ? When once it is gone you will 
never get it back. Let the pretty one have her 
little day to play and sing and be happy. Does 
she not make this garden a sort of Paradise with 
her little ways and her sweet words ? Now, my 
sister, these all belong to you ; but, once she is 
given to another, there is no saying what may 
come. One thing only may you count on with 
certainty : that these dear days when she is all 



102 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

day by your side and sleeps in your bosom all 
night are over, — she will belong to you no 
more, but to a strange man who hath neither 
toiled nor wrought for her, and all her pretty 
ways and dutiful thoughts must be for him." 



UNCLE TOM's CABE^. 

Beautiful Her face was round and rosy, with a 
^^®' healthful, downy softness, suggestive of 
a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by 
age, was parted smoothly back from her high, 
placid forehead, on which time had written no 
inscription except " Peace on earth, good will to 
men," and beneath shone a large pair of clear, 
honest, loving, brown eyes ; you only needed to 
look straight into them, to feel that you saw to 
the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever 
throbbed in woman's bosom. So much has been 
said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't 
somebody wake up to the beauty of old women ? 

Exaction. It is a great mistake to suppose that a 
woman with no heart will be an easy creditor in 
the exchange of affection. There is not on earth 
a more merciless exactor of love from others 
than a thoroughly selfish woman ; and the more 
unlovely she grows, the more jealously and scru- 
pulously she exacts love to the uttermost far- 
thing. 



WOMAN. 103 



PALMETTO LEAVES. 

Character. A flower is commonly thought the em- 
blem of a woman ; and a woman is generally 
thought of as something sweet, clinging, tender, 
and perishable. But there are women flowers 
that correspond to the forest magnolia, — high 
and strong, with a great hold of root and a great 
spread of branches ; and whose pulsations of 
heart and emotion come forth like these silver 
lilies that illuminate the green shadows of the 
magnolia forests. 



POGANUC PEOPLE. 

"Turn "Oh, land o' Goshen, Dolly, what do 
you mmd them boys for? " said Nabby. 
" Boys is mostly hateful when girls is little ; but 
we take our turns by and by," she said, with a 
complacent twinkle of her brown eyes. " I make 
them stand 'round, I bet ye, and you will when 
you get older." 

MY WIFE AND I. 

Woman's My mother was one of that class of 

spiritual i .i . 

power. women whose power on earth seems to 

be only the greater for being a spiritual 

and invisible one. The control of such women 

over men is like that of the soul over the body. 



104 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

The body is visible, forceful, obtrusive, self-as- 
serting; the soul, invisible, sensitive, yet with a 
subtile and vital power which constantly gains 
control, and holds every inch that it gains. 

Orderliness. Like a true little woman, she seemed to 
have nerves through all her clothes, that kept 
them in order. 

Woman The motherly instinct is in the hearts 

and Chris- r n j i i i 

tianity. 01 all true women, and sooner or later 
the true wife becomes a mother to her 
husband ; she guides him, cares for him, teaches 
him, and catechizes him, all in the nicest way 
possible. ... As for the soul-life, I believe it is 
woman who holds faith in the world, — it is 
woman behind the wall, casting oil on the fire 
that burns brighter and brighter, while the devil 
pours on water ; and you '11 never get Christian- 
ity out of the world while there 's a woman in it. 



WE AMD OUR NEIGHBORS. 



Woman's " That 's what you women are for — at 

mission. i . i Ti. 5 

least such women as you. It s your 
mission to interpret differing natures — to bind, 
-^nd blend, and unite." 



Real con- That fine, skillful faculty of analysis 
and synthesis which forms the distinc- 
tive interest of feminine conversation. 



CHAPTER IV. 

CHILDREN. 
THE minister's WOOING. 

The odd One sometimes sees launched into a 
family circle a child of so different a 
nature from all the rest, that it might seem as if, 
like an aerolite, he had fallen out of another 
sphere. 



OLDTOWN FOLKS. 

ChUd's In childhood the passions move with a 
simplicity of action unknown to any 
other period of life, and a child's hatred and a 
child's revenge have an intensity of bitterness 
entirely unalloyed by moral considerations ; and 
when a child is without an object of affection 
and feels itself unloved, its whole vigor of being 
goes into the channels of hate. 

Child That instinctive sense by which children 

^ "^ ' and dogs learn the discerning of spirits. 



106 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Ciiiidish Among the many unexplained and in- 
tMes.^ explicable woes of childhood are its 
bitter antagonisms, so perfectly power- 
less, but often so very decided, against certain of 
the grown people who control it. Perhaps some 
of us may remember respectable, well-meaning 
people, with whom iu our mature years we live 
in perfect amity, but who in our childhood appear 
to us bitter enemies. Children are remarkably 
helpless in this respect, because they cannot 
choose their company and surroundings as grown 
people can ; and are sometimes entirely in the 
power of those with whom their natures are so 
unsympathetic that they may almost be said to 
have a constitutional aversion to them. 

Getting Nobody that has not suffered from such 
worid.^*^^ causes can tell the amount of torture 
that a child of a certain nervous forma- 
tion undergoes in the mere process of getting 
accustomed to his body, to the physical forces of 
life, and to the ways and doings of that world of 
grown-up people who have taken possession of 
the earth before him, and are using it, and deter- 
mined to go on using it, for their own behoof 
and convenience, in spite of his childish efforts 
to push in his little individuality, and seize his 
little portion of existence. He is at once laid 
hold upon by the older majority as an instrument 
to work out their views of what is fit and proper 
for himself and themselves ; and if he proves a 
hard-working or creaking instrument, has the 



CHILDREN. 107 

further capability of being rebuked and chas- 
tened for it. 



Quiet ciui- I was One of those children who are all 
^^^ ear, — dreamy listeners, who brood 

over all that they hear, without daring to speak 
of it. 



Individ- He was ouG of thosG children who 
chiidre™. retreat into themselves and make a 
shield of quietness and silence in the 
presence of many people, while Tina, on the 
other hand, was electrically excited, waxed bril- 
liant in color, and rattled and chattered with as 
fearless confidence as a cat-bird. 

A child's " But, Tina, mother always told us it 
p osop y. ^^g wicked to hate anybody. We must 
love our enemies." 

" You don't love old Crab Smith, do you ? " 

" No, I don't ; but I try not to hate him," 
said the boy. "I won't think anything about 
him." 

" I can't help thinking," said Tina ; ** and when 
I think, I am so angry ! I feel such a burning in 
here ! " she said, striking her little breast ; " it 's 
just like fire." 

" Then don't think about her at all," said the 
boy ; " it is n't pleasant to feel that way. Think 
about the whip-poor-wills singing in the woods 
over there, — how plain they say it, don't they ? 
— And the frogs all singing, with their little, 



108 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

round, yellow eyes looking up out of the water ; 
and the moon looking down on us so pleasantly ! 
she seems just like mother ! " 

A child's Is there ever a hard question in morals 
ques ons. ^j^^^ children do not drive straight at in 
their wide-eyed questioning ? 



PEAKL OF orb's ISLAND. 

Holiness of The wise men of the east at the feet of 
^^^^' an infant, offering gifts, gold, frankin- 
cense, and myrrh, is just a parable of what goes 
on in every house where there is a young child. 
AU the hard and the harsh, the common and the 
disagreeable, is for the parents, — all the bright 
and beautiful for their child. 

Pure joy. Childhood's joys are all pure gold. 

Mischief. " Of all the children that ever she see, 
he beat all for finding out new mischief, — the 
moment you make him understand he must n't 
do one thing, he 's right at another." 

Different " Mis' Peunel ought to be trainin' of 
ments.^^ her up to work," said Mrs. Kittridge. 
" Sally could oversew and hem when 
she wa' n't more 'n three years old ; nothin' 
straightens out children like work. Mis' Fennel 
she jest keeps that ar' child to look at." 



CHILDREN. 109 

" All children a'n't alike, Mis' Kittridge," said 
Miss Roxy, sententiously. "This 'un a'n't like 
your Sally. ' A hen and a bumble-bee can't be 
fetched up alike,' fix it how you will ! " 

ChUd's All the efforts of Nature, during the 
uoyancy. ^^j.^^. yg^rs of a healthy childhood, are 
bent on effacing and obliterating painful imj)res- 
sions, wiping out from each day the sorrows of 
the last, as the daily tide effaces the furrows on 
the seashore. 

Unseen Neither of them had known a doubt or 
^®^^* a fear in that joyous trance of forbid- 
den pleasure, which shadowed with so many 
fears the wiser and more far-seeing heads and 
hearts of the grown people ; nor was there 
enough language yet in common between the two 
classes to make the little ones comprehend the 
risk they had run. 

Perhaps our older brothers, in our Father's 
house, look anxiously out when we are sailing 
gayly over life's sea, over unknown depths, amid 
threatening monsters, but want words to tell us 
why what seems so bright is so dangerous. 

Love of The island was wholly solitary, and 
there is something to children quite 
delightful in feeling that they have a little, lonely 
world all to themselves. Childhood is itself such 
an enchanted island, separated by mysterious 
depths from the main land of nature, life, and 
reality. 



110 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Fate. But babies will live, all the more when 

everybody says it is a pity they should. Life 
goes on as inexorably in this world as death. 

Sensitive There are natures sent down into this 

natures. -, ■, u j.* -i.' j 

harsh world so timorous, sensitive, and 
helpless in themselves, that the utmost stretch of 
indulgence and kindness is needed for their 
development, — like plants which the warmest 
shelf of the green-house and the most watchful 
care of the gardener alone can bring into flower. 

Child's " It 's curious what notions chil'en will 
^' get in their heads," said Captain Kit- 
tridge. " They put this an' that together and 
think it over, an' come out with such queer 
things." 

THE CHIMNEY CORKER. 

A child's The hearts of little children are easily 
gained, and their love is real and warm, 
and no true woman can become the object of it 
without feeling her own life made brighter. 



THE MAYFLOWER. 

A child's But the feelings of grown-up children 
sjoapathy.^ exist in the minds of little ones oftener 
than is supposed ; and I had, even at this early 
day, the same keen sense of all that touched 



CHILDREN. Ill 

the heart wrong ; the same longing for some- 
thing which should touch it aright ; the same 
discontent with latent, matter-of-course affection, 
and the same craving for sympathy, which 
has been the unprofitable fashion of this world 
in all ages. And no human being possessing 
such constitutionals has a better chance of being 
made unhappy by them than the backward, un- 
interesting, wrong-doing child. We can all sym- 
pathize, to some extent, with men and women y 
but how few can go back to the sympathies of 
childhood ; can understand the desolate insig- 
nificance of not being one of the grown-up 
people ; of being sent to bed, to be out of the way 
in the evening, and to school, to be out of the 
way in the morning ; of manifold similar griev- 
ances and distresses, which the child has no 
elocution to set forth, and the grown person no 
imagination to conceive. 

A child's Ah, these children, little witches, pretty 
power. eyeix in all their faults and absurdities. 
See, for example, yonder little fellow in a naughty 
fit. He has shaken his long curls over his 
deep-blue eyes, the fair brow is bent in a frown, 
the rose-leaf Hp is pursed up in infinite defiance, 
and the white shoulder thrust angrily forward. 
Can any but a child look so pretty, even in its 
naughtiness ? 

Then comes the instant change ; flashing smiles 
and tears, as the good comes back all in a rush, 
and you are overwhelmed with protestations, 



112 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

promises, and kisses ! They are irresistible, too, 
these little ones. They pull away the scholar's 
pen, tumble about his paper, make somersets 
over his books ; and what can he do ? They 
tear up newspapers, litter the carpets, break, pull, 
and upset, and then jabber unheard-of English in 
self-defense ; and what can you do for yourself ? 

The child Wouldst thou know, parent, what is 
that faith which unlocks heaven ? Go 
not to wrangling polemics, or creeds and forms 
of theology, but draw to thy bosom thy little one, 
and read in that clear, trusting eye the lesson of 
eternal life. Be only to thy God as thy child is 
to thee, and all is done. Blessed shalt thou be, 
indeed, when " a Httle child shall lead thee." 



PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY. 

Baby's " An' it 's a blessin' they brings wid 

dreams. ? . i • ji ^ 

em to a house, sir ; the angels come 
down wid 'em. We can't see 'em, sir ; but, bless 
the darlin', she can. An' she smiles in her sleep 
when she sees 'em." 



Betty's bright idea. 

Mother A heavenly amusement, such as that 
with which mothers listen to the foolish- 
wise prattle of children just learning to talk. 



CHILDREN. 113 



AGNES OF SORRENTO. 

A child's " The fact is, when I begin to talk, she 

defense. , -i i i i i i 

gets her arms around my old neck, and 
falls to weeping and kissing me at such a rate 
as makes a fool of me. If the child would only 
be rebellious, one could do something ; but this 
love takes all the stiffness out of one's joints." 



UNCLE TOM S CABIN. 

Child's " What would the poor and lowly do 
without children ? " said St. Clare, lean- 
ing on the railing, and watching Eva, as she 
tripped off, leading Tom with her. " Your little 
child is your only true Democrat. Tom, now, is 
a hero to Eva ; his stories are wonders in her 
eyes, his songs and Methodist hymns are better 
than an opera, and the traps and little bits of 
trash in his pocket a mine of jewels, and he the 
most wonderful Tom that ever wore a black skin. 
This is one of the roses of Eden, that the Lord 
has dropped down expressly for the poor and 
lowly, who get few enough of any other kind." 

Animation. She was one of those busy, tripping 
creatures, that can no more be contained in one 
place than a sunbeam or a summer breeze. 



114 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



SUIOrK" MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS. 



Unpervert- Children are unsophisticated, and like 

ed taste. t. j.j. j.i_ •! j 

sugar better than silver any day. 



POGANUC PEOPLE. 

Child-faith. Dolly was at the happy age when any- 
thing bright and heavenly seemed credible, and 
had the child-faith to which all things are possi- 
ble. She had even seriously pondered, at times, 
the feasibility of walking some day to the end of 
the rainbow, to look for the pot of gold which 
Nabby had credibly assured her was to be found 
there ; and if at any time in her ramblings 
through the woods a wolf had met her, and 
opened a conversation, as in the case of Little 
Red Riding Hood, she would have been no way 
surprised, but kept up her part of the interview 
with becoming spirit. 



LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW. 

Simplicity. " Mother," she said, soberly, when she 
lay down in her little bed that night, " I 'm going 
to ask God to keep me humble." 

" Why, my dear ? " 

" Because I feel tempted to be proud, — I can 
make such good bread ! " 



CHILDREN. 116 



A DOG S MISSION. 

Hobbies. He bores everybody to death with his 
locomotive as artlessly as grown people do with 
their hobbies. 

Our When the blaze of the wood-fire flick- 

Charley. j j • 

ers up and down m our snug evening 
parlor, there dances upon the wall a little shadow, 
with a pug nose, a domestic household shadow — 
a busy shadow — a little restless specimen of 
perpetual motion, and the owner thereof is " our 
Charley." Now we should not write about him 
and his ways, if he were strictly a peculiar and 
individual existence of our own home-circle ; but 
it is not so. " Our Charley " exists in a thousand, 
nay, a million families ; he has existed in millions 
in all time back ; his name is variously rendered 
in all the tongues of the earth ; in short, we take 
" our Charley " in a generic sense, and we mean 
to treat of him as a little copy of the grown man 
— enacting in a shadowy ballet by the fireside 
all that men act in earnest in after life. He is a 
looking-glass for grown people, in which they 
may see how certain things become them — in 
which they may sometimes even see streaks and 
gleamings of something wiser tHan all the harsh 
conflict of life teaches them. 



116 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



MY WIFE AND I. 

Heavenly It seems to me that lovely and loving 
childhood, with its truthfulness, its 
frank sincerity, its pure, simple love, is so sweet 
and holy an estate that it would be a beautiful 
thing in heaven to have a band of heavenly chil- 
dren, guileless, gay, and forever joyous — tender 
spring blossoms of the Kingdom of Light. Was 
it of such whom He had left in his heavenly 
home our Savior was thinking, when He took lit- 
tle children up in his arms, and blessed them, 
and said, " of such is the Kingdom of Heaven ? " 

Poetiy and The first child in a family is its poem, 
prose. — .J. .g ^ g^^^ ^£ nativity play, and we 

bend before the young stranger with gifts, "gold, 
frankincense, and myrrh." But the tenth child 
in a poor family is prose, and gets simply what 
is due to comfort. There are no superfluities, no 
fripperies, no idealities, about the tenth cradle. 

Aciuid's My individual pursuits, my own little 

crosses. l ^ s^ • l ±. £ p 

stock 01 interests, were ot course or no 
account. I was required to be in a perfectly 
free, disengaged state of mind, and ready to 
drop everything at a moment's warning from 
any of my half-dozen seniors. " Here, Hal, run 
down cellar and get me a dozen apples," my 
brother would say, just as I had half-built a 
block-house. " Harry, run upstairs and get the 



CHILDREN. 117 

book I left on the bed " — " Harry, run out to 
the barn and get the rake I left there " — " Here, 
Harry, carry this up garret " — " Harry, run out 
to the tool-shop and get that " — were sounds 
constantly occurring — breaking up my private, 
cherished little enterprise of building cob-houses, 
making mill-dams and bridges, or loading car- 
riages, or driving horses. Where is the mature 
Christian who could bear with patience the inter- 
ruptions and crosses in his daily schemes that 
beset a boy? 

Repression, When children grow up among older 
people, and are pushed and jostled and set aside 
in the more engrossing interests of their elders, 
there is an almost incredible amount of timidity 
and dumbness of nature, with regard to the 
expression of inward feeling, — and yet, often at 
this time, the instinctive sense of pleasure and 
pain is fearfully acute. But the child has im- 
perfectly learned language ; his stock of words, 
as yet, consists only in names and attributes of 
outward and physical objects, and he has no 
phraseology with which to embody a mere emo- 
tional experience. 



CHAPTER V. 
EDUCATION. 

THE minister's WOOING. 

Habit. A man cannot ravel out the stitches in 
which early days have knit him. 



Human All Systems that deal with the infinite 
are, besides, exposed to danger from 
small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, 
which become deadly when carried to such vast 
results. The smallest speck of earth's dust, in 
the focus of an infinite lens, aj3pears magni- 
fied among the heavenly orbs as a frightful mon- 
ster. 

Defective Tru© it is, that one can scarcely call 
that education which teaches woman 
everything except herself, — except the things 
that relate to her own peculiar womanly destiny, 
and, on plea of the holiness of ignorance, sends 
her without a word of just counsel into the temp- 
tations of life. 



EDUCATION. 119 



OLDTOWN FOLKS. 

Education The problem of education is seriously 

of man and t . i i ^i t •<• c 

woman. Complicated by the peculiarities ot wo- 
manhood. If we suppose two souls, ex- 
actly alike, sent into bodies, the one of man, the 
other of woman, that mere fact alone alters the 
whole mental and moral history of the two. 



SAM LAWSON's stories. 

« Keep " Wal, ye see, boys, that 'ere 's jest the 

on."^ way to fight the Devil. Jest keep 

straight on with what ye 're doin', an' 

don't ye mind him, an' he can't do nothin' to 

ye." 

Letting go. « Lordy massy ! what can any on us 
do ? There 's places where folks jest lets go 
'cause they hes to. Things ain't as they want 
'em, an' they can't alter 'em." 



PEARL OF ORR's ISLAJSTD. 



A mutual Thosc who coutend against giving 

education. ,■% j j.* j 'i. 

woman the same education as man do it 
on the ground that it would make the woman 
unfeminine, — as if Nature had done her work 
so slightly that it could be so easily raveled and 



120 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

knit over. In fact, there is a masculine and femi- 
nine element in all knowledge, and a man and a 
woman, put to the same study, extract only what 
their nature fits them to see — so that knowledge 
can be fully orbed only when the two unite in 
the search and share the spoils. 

Baiting the " But don't you think Moses shows some 
°^" taste for reading and study ? " 

" Pretty well, pretty well ! " said Zephaniah. 
" Jist keep him a little hungry, not let him get all 
he wants, you see, and he '11 bite the sharper. 
If I want to catch cod I don't begin with flingin' 
over a barrel o' bait. So with the boys, jist bait 
'em with a book here an' a book there, an' kind 
o' let 'em feel their own way, an' then, if nothin' 
will do but a feller must go to college, give in to 
him, — that 'd be my way." 

A natural " Colleges is well enough for your 

education. ,f .♦!. "iii n 

smooth, straight - gramed lumber, tor 
gen'ral buildin' ; but come to fellers that 's got 
knots an' streaks, an' cross-grains, like Moses 
Pennel, an' the best way is to let 'em eddicate 
'emselves, as he 's a-doin.' He 's cut out for the 
sea, plain enough, an' he 'd better be up to Umba- 
gog, cuttin' timber for his ship, than havin' rows 
with tutors, an' blowin' the roof off the colleges, 
as one o' them 'ere kind o' fellers is apt to, when 
he don't have work to use up his steam. Why, 
mother, there 's more gas got up in them Bruns- 
wick buildin's from young men that are spiHn' 
for hard work than you could shake a stick at." 



EDUCATION. 121 



LITTLE FOXES. 

Recreation. The true manner of judging of the 
worth of amusements is to trjr them by their 
effects on the nerves and spirits the day after. 
True amusement ought to be, as the word indi- 
cates, recreation, — something that refreshes, 
turns us out anew, rests the mind and body by 
change, and gives cheerfulness and alacrity to 
our return to duty. 

Making the The principal of a large and compli- 
cated public institution was compli- 
mented on maintaining such uniformity of cheer- 
fulness amid such a diversity of cares. " I 've 
made up my mind to be satisfied, when things 
are done half as well as I would have them," 
was his answer, and the same philosophy would 
apply with cheering results to the domestic 
sphere. 

Individ- Every human being has some handle by 
^* which he may be lifted, some groove in 
which he was meant to run ; and the great work 
of life, as far as our relations with each other are 
concerned, is to lift each one by his own proper 
handle, and run each one in his own proper 
groove. 



122 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS. 

Need of Parents may depend upon it that, if 
trSons. they do not make an attractive resort 
for their boys, Satan will. There are 
places enough, kept warm and light, and bright 
and merry, where boys can go whose mothers' 
parlors are too fine for them to sit in. There are 
enough to be found to clap them on the back, 
and tell them stories that their mothers must not 
hear, and laugh when they compass with their 
little piping voices the dreadful litanies of sin 
and shame. 

Home edu- The word home has in it the elements 
of love, rest, permanency, and liberty; 
but besides these it has in it the idea of an educa- 
tion by which all that is purest within us is de- 
veloped into nobler forms, fit for a higher life. 
The little child by the home fireside was taken 
on the Master's knee when he would explain to 
his disciples the mysteries of the kingdom. 

The educa- Education is the highest object of home, 

tion of the i , i , • • .i ' i . 

parent. out education m the widest sense — 
education of the parents no less than of 
the children. In a true home, the man and the 
woman receive, through their cares, their watch- 
ings, their hospitality, their charity, the last and 
highest finish that earth can put upon them. 
From that they must pass upward, for earth can 
teach them no more. 



EDUCATION. 123 

Perfection To do common things perfectly is far 

thingsf better worth our endeavor than to do 

uncommon things respectably. 

The cross. Right on the threshold of all perfection 
lies the cross to be taken up. No one can go 
over or around that cross in science or in art. 
Without labor and self-denial neither Raphael 
nor Michael Angelo nor Newton was made per- 
fect. 

THE CHIMISTET CORNER. 

A weu- "We still incline to class distinctions and 
developed aristocracies. We incline to the scheme 
of dividing the world's work into two 
classes : first, physical labor, which is held to be 
rude and vulgar, and the province of a lower 
class ; and second, brain-labor, held to be refined 
and aristocratic, and the province of a higher 
class. Meanwhile the Creator, who is the great- 
est of levelers, has given to every human being 
both a physical system, needing to be kept in 
order by physical labor, and an intellectual or 
braui power, needing to be kept in order by 
brain labor. Work, use, employment, is the con- 
dition of health in both; and he who works 
either to the neglect of the other lives but a half- 
life, and is an imperfect human being. 



124 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



THE MAYFLOWER. 

intemper- It IS a great mistake to call nothing in- 
temperance but that degree of physical 
excitement which completely overthrows the 
mental powers. There is a state of nervous 
excitability, resulting from what is often called 
moderate stimulation, which often long precedes 
this, and is, in regard to it, like the premonitory 
warnings of the fatal cholera — an unsuspected 
draft on the vital powers, from which, at any 
moment, they may sink into irremediable col- 
lapse. 

It is in this state, often, that the spirit of 
gambling or of wild speculation is induced by the 
morbid cravings of an over-stimulated system. 
Unsatisfied with the healthy and regular routine 
of business, and the laws of gradual and solid 
prosperity, the excited and unsteady imagination 
leads its subjects to daring risks, with the alter- 
native of unbounded gain on the one side, or of 
utter ruin on the other. And when, as is too 
often the case, that ruin comes, unrestrained and 
desperate intemperance is the wretched resort to 
allay the ravings of disappointment and despair. 

Religious The only difficulty, after all, is that the 
at home, keeping of the Sabbath and the impart- 
ing of religious instruction are not made 
enough of a home object. Parents pass off the 
responsibility on to the Sunday-school teacher, 



EDUCATION. 125 

and suppose, of course, if they send their children 
to Sunday-school, they do the best they can for 
them. Now, I am satisfied, from my experience 
as a Sabbath-school teacher, that the best relig- 
ious instruction imparted abroad still stands in 
need of the cooperation of a systematic plan of 
religious discipline and instruction at home ; for, 
after all, God gives a power to the efforts of a 
parent that can never be transferred to other 
hands. 

What girls If, amid the multiplied schools, whose 

should be 1 , • , ,-, 

taught. advertisements now throng our papers, 
purporting to teach girls everything, 
both ancient and modern, high and low, from 
playing on the harp and working pin-cushions up 
to civil engineering, surveying, and navigation, 
there were any which could teach them to be 
women, — to have thoughts, opinions, and modes 
of action of their own, — such a school would be 
worth having. If one half of the good purposes 
which are in the hearts of the ladies of our nation 
were only acted out without fear of anybody's 
opinion, we should certainly be a step nearer the 
millennium. 



PESTK AND WHITE TYRANNY. 



Dangers of She had the misfortune — and a great 
^*"^ ^' one it is — to have been singularly 
beautiful from the cradle, and so was praised and 



126 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

exclaimed over and caressed as she walked the 
streets. She was sent for far and near ; borrowed 
to be looked at ; her picture taken by photogra- 
phers. If one reflects how many foolish and 
inconsiderate people there are in the world, who 
have no scruple in making a pet and plaything of 
a pretty child, one will see how this one unlucky 
lot of being beautiful in childhood spoiled LiUie's 
chances of an average share of good sense and 
goodness. The only hope for such a case lies in 
the chance of possessing judicious parents. 



AGNES OF SOKRENTO. 

Patient " Gently, my son ! gently ! " said the 
wai mg. jiiQn]^^ . a nothing is lost by patience. 
See how long it takes the good Lord to make a 
fair flower out of a little seed ; and He does all 
quietly, without bluster. Wait on Him a little 
in peacefulness and prayer, and see what He will 
do for thee." 



UNCLE TOM S CABIN. 

«*Bobser. "Well, yer see," said Sam, proceeding 
gravely to wash down Haley's pony, 
" I 'se 'quired what ye may call a habit o' hohser- 
vation, Andy. It 's a very 'portant habit, Andy, 
and I 'commend yer to be cultivatin' it, now 
ye 'r' young. Hist up that hind foot, Andy. 



EDUCATION. 127 

Yer see, Andy, it 's bobservation makes all der 
difference in niggers. Did n't I see which way 
de wind blew dis yer mornin' ? Did n't I see 
what missis wanted, though she never let on? 
Dat ar' 's bobservation, Andy. I 'spects it 's what 
you may call a faculty. Faculties is different in 
different peoples, but cultivatin' of 'em goes a 
great way." 

Honoring " Now, Mas'r George," said Tom, " ye 
mother. ^^^^ ^^ ^ ^^^^ ^^^ . 'j^ember how 

many hearts is sot on ye. Al'ays keep close to 
yer mother. Don't be gettin' into any o' them 
foolish ways boys has of gettin' too big to mind 
their mothers. Tell ye what, Mas'r George, the 
Lord gives good many things twice over ; but he 
don't give ye a mother but once. Ye '11 never 
see sich another woman, Mas'r George, if ye live 
to be a hundred years old. So, now, you hold 
on to her, and grow up and be a comfort to her, 
thar 's my own good boy, — you will, now, won't 

ye- 

DRED. 

Silent in- " Nina, I know, will love you ; and if 
fluence. ^^^ never try to advise her and in- 
fluence her, you will influence her very much. 
Good people are a long while learning thafj 
Anne. They think to do good to others by 
interfering and advising. They don't know that 
all they have to do is to live." 



128 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Starting It is Only the first step that costs. 

right. 

LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW. 



The right " Knowledge has just been rubbed on to 
study? me upon the outside, while you have 
opened your mind, and stretched out 
your arms to it, and taken it in with all your 
heart." 



A DOGS MISSION. 

The turn- There is an age when the waves of 
inlife,^^ manhood pour in on the boy like the 
tides in the Bay of Fundy. He does 
not know himself what to do with himself, and 
nobody else knows either ; and it is exactly at 
this point that many a fine fellow has been ruined 
for want of faith and patience and hope in those 
who have the care of him. 

"What But, after all, Charley is not to be 
dowiS wholly shirked, for he is an institution, 
Charley?" ^ solemn and awful fact ; and on the 
answer of the question, Y/hat is to be done with 
him ? depends a future. Many a hard, morose, 
and bitter man has come from a Charley turned 
off and neglected ; many a parental heartache 
has come from a Charley left to run the streets, 
that mamma and sisters might play on the piano 
and write letters m peace. It is easy to get rid 
of him — there are fifty ways of doing that — 



EDUCATION. 129 

he is a spirit that can be promptly laid for a 
season, but if not laid aright, will come back by 
and by a strong man armed, when you cannot 
send him off at pleasure. 

Mamma and sisters had better pay a little tax 
to Charley now, than a terrible one by and by. 
There is something significant in the old English 
phrase, with which our Scriptures make us famil- 
iar, — a man child ! A man child ! There you 
have the word that should make you think more 
than twice before you answer the question, What 
shall we do with Charley ? 

For to-day he is at your feet — to-day you can 
make him laugh; you can make him cry; you can 
persuade, and coax, and turn him to your pleas- 
ure ; you can make his eyes fill and his bosom 
swell with recitals of good and noble deeds ; in 
short, you can mold him, if you will take the 
trouble. 

But look ahead some years, when that little 
voice shall ring in deep bass tones ; when that 
small foot shall have a man's weight and tramp ; 
when a rough beard shall cover that little round 
chin, and all the strength of manhood fill out 
that little form. Then, you would give worlds 
to have the key to his heart, to be able to turn 
and guide him to your wiU ; but if you lose that 
key now he is little, you may search for it care- 
fully with tears some other day, and not find it. 
Old housekeepers have a proverb that one hour 
lost in the morning is never found all day — it 
has a significance in this case. 



130 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



MY WIFE AND I. 



Limit of One part of the science of living is to 

bmty?^^' learn just what our own responsibility is, 

and to let other people's alone. 

starved People don't realize what it is to starve 
faculties ; they understand physical star- 
vation, but the slow fainting and dying of desires 
and capabilities for want of anything to feed 
upon, the withering of powers for want of exer- 
cise, is what they do not understand. 

Idealizing The chief evil of poverty is the crush- 
our wor ^^ ^^ ideality out of life, taking away 
its poetry and substituting hard prose ; — and 
this, with them, was impossible. My father 
loved the work he did as the artist loves his 
painting, and the sculptor his chisel. A man 
needs less money when he is doing only what he 
loves to do — what, in fact, he Tnust do, — pay 
or no pay. . . . My mother, from her deep spir- 
itual nature, was one soul with my father in his 
life-work. With the moral organization of a 
prophetess she stood nearer to heaven than he, 
and looking in told him what she saw, and he, 
holding her hand, felt the thrill of celestial elec- 
tricity. 

True " I want you to be a good man. A 

grea ess. ^j.^^^ many have tried to be great men, 



EDUCATION. 131 

and failed, but nobody ever sincerely tried to be 
a good man and failed." 

Lack of But I speak from experience when I 
Sstf uction. say that the course of study in Christian 
America is so arranged that a boy, from 
the grammar school upward till he graduates, is 
so fully pressed and overloaded with all other 
studies that there is no probability that he will 
find the time or the inclination for such (reli- 
gious) investigations. 

Educating In OUT days we have heard much said 
husbands, of the importance of training women to 
be wives. Is there not something to be 
said on the importance of training men to be 
husbands ? Is the wide latitude of thought and 
reading and expression which has been accorded 
as a matter of course to the boy and the young 
man, the conventionally allowed familiarity with 
coarseness and indelicacy, a fair preparation to 
enable him to be the intimate companion of a 
pure woman ? For how many ages has it been 
the doctrine that man and woman were to meet 
in marriage, the one crystal-pure, the other foul 
with the permitted garbage of all sorts of un- 
cleansed literature and license ? 

If the man is to be the head of the woman, 
even as Christ is the head of the Church, should 
he not be her equal, at least, in purity ? 



Moral The pain-giving power is a most neces- 
sary part of a well-organized human 



courage. 



132 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

being. Nobody can ever do anything without 
the courage to be disagreeable at times. 

Appreciat- Who is appreciative and many-sided 
^diMity. enough to guide the first efforts of gen- 
ius just coming to consciousness ? How 
many could profitably have advised Hawthorne 
when his peculiar Rembrandt style was forming ? 
As a race, we Anglo-Saxons are so self-sphered 
that we lack the power to enter into the individ- 
uality of another mind, and give profitable ad- 
vice for its direction. 

Truth told The truth, bitterly told by an enemy 
enemy. witli a vivid power of statement, is a 
tonic oftentimes too strong for one's 
powers of endurance. 



WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS. 

immuta- In some constitutions, with some hered- 
Nature's itary predispositions, the indiscretions 
laws. ^j^^ ignorances of youth leave a fatal, 

irremediable injury. Though the sin be in the 
first place one of inexperience and ignorance, it 
is one that nature never forgives. The evil once 
done can never be undone ; no prayers, no en- 
treaties, no resolutions, can change the conse- 
quences of violated law. The brain and nerve 
force once vitiated by poisonous stimulants be- 
come thereafter subtle tempters and traitors, for- 



EDUCATION. 133 

ever lying in wait to deceive, and urging to ruin ; 
and he who is saved is saved so as by fire. 

Doing our " There must be second fiddles in an 
own work, orchestra, and it 's fortunate that I have 
precisely the talent for playing one, and my doc- 
trine is that the second fiddle well played is 
quite as good as the first. What would the first 
be without it ? " 

Courage. " Well, there *s no way to get through 
the world but to keep doing, and to attack every 
emergency with courage." 

Value of " We Ve got to get truth as we can in 
*™*^ this world, just as miners dig gold out 
of the mines, with all the quartz, and dirt, and 
dross ; but it pays." 



CHAPTER VI. 
NATURE. 

THE MLN-JSTER's WOOING. 

Want of The next day broke calm and fair. The 
m nakire^ robins sang remorselessly in the apple- 
tree, and were answered by bobolink, 
oriole, and a whole tribe of ignorant little bits of 
feathered happiness that danced among the 
leaves. Golden-glorious unclosed those purple 
eyelids of the east, and regally came up the sun ; 
and the treacherous sea broke into a thousand 
smiles, laughing and dancing with every ripple, 
as unconsciously as if no form dear to human 
hearts had gone down beneath it. Oh, treach- 
erous, deceiving beauty of outward things ! 
beauty, wherein throbs not one answering nerve 
to human pain ! 

The sea. And ever and anon came on the still 
air the soft, eternal pulsations of the distant sea, 
— sound mournfullest, most mysterious, of all 
the harpings of nature. It was the sea, — the 
deep, eternal sea, — the treacherous, soft, dread- 
ful, inexplicable sea. 



NATURE. 135 



OLDTOWN FOLIiS. 

The sunrise. The next moming showed as brilliant a 
getting-up of gold and purple as ever belonged 
to the toilet of a morning. There was to be seen 
from Asphyxia's bedroom window a brave sight, 
if there had been any eyes to enjoy it, — a range 
of rocky cliffs with little pin-feathers of black 
pine upon them, and behind them the sky all 
aflame with bars of massy light, — orange and 
crimson and burning gold, — and long bright 
rays, darting hither and thither, touched now the 
window of a farm-house, which seemed to kindle 
and flash back a morning salutation ; now they hit 
a tall, scarlet maple, now they pierced between 
clumps of pine, making their black edges flame 
with gold ; and over all, in the brightening sky, 
stood the morning star, like a great, tremulous 
tear of light, just ready to fall on the darkened 
world. 

October in Nature in New England is, for the most 
New Eng- ^^^^^ ^ sharp, determined matron of the 
Miss Asphyxia school. She is shrewd, 
keen, relentless, energetic. She runs through the 
seasons a merciless express-train, on which you 
may jump if you can, at her hours, but which 
knocks you down remorselessly if you come in 
her way, and leaves you hopelessly behind if you 
are late. Only for a few brief weeks in the 
autumn does this grim, belligerent female conde- 



136 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

scend to be charming; but v/hen she does set 
about it, the veriest Circe of enchanted isles 
could not do it better. Airs more dreamy, more 
hazy, more full of purple light and lustre, never 
lay over Cyprus or Capri, than those which each 
October overshadow the granite rocks and prickly 
chestnuts of New England. The trees seem to 
run no longer sap, but some strange liquid glow ; 
the colors of the flowers flame up, from the cold, 
pallid delicacy of spring, into royal tints wrought 
of the very fire of the sun, and the hues of even- 
ing clouds. The humblest weed, which we trod 
under our foot, unnoticed, in summer, changes 
with the first frost into some colored marvel, 
and lifts itself up into a study for a painter, just 
as the touch of death or adversity strikes out in 
a rough nature traits of nobleness and delicacy 
before wholly undreamed of. 



THE CHIMNEY CORNER. 

Gems. Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral 
flowers ; they are the blossoms of the dark, 
hard mine ; and what they want in perfume, they 
make up in durability. 



THE MAYFLOWER. 



Medita- I sometimes think that leaves are the 
the oak. thoughts of trees, and that if we only 



NATURE. 137 

knew it, we should find their life's experience 
recorded in them. Our oak — what a crop of 
meditations and remembrances must he have 
thrown forth, leafing out century after century ! 
Awhile he spake and thought only of red deer 
and Indians ; of the trillium that opened its 
white triangle in his shade ; of the scented arbu- 
tus, fair as the pink ocean shell, weaving her 
fragrant mats in the moss at his feet ; of feathery 
ferns, casting their silent shadows on the check- 
erberry leaves, and all those sweet, wild, name- 
less, half-mossy things that live in the gloom of 
forests, and are only desecrated when brought to 
scientific light, laid out, and stretched on a bo- 
tanic bier. Sweet old forest days ! when blue 
jay, and yellow-hammer, and bobolink made his 
leaves merry, and summer was a long opera of 
such music as Mozart dimly dreamed. But then 
came human kind bustling beneath ; wonder- 
ing, fussing, exploring, measuring, treading down 
flowers, cutting down trees, scaring bobolinks, 
and Andover, as men say, began to be settled. 

The brook Let US stop the old chaisc and get out a 
in winter. ^^^^^^ ^^ i^^^ ^^ ^liis brook, — One of 

our last summer's pets. What is he doing this 
winter ? Let us at least say " How do you do ? " 
to him. Ah, here he is ! and he and Jack Frost 
together have been turning the little gap in the 
old stone wall, through which he leaped down 
to the road, into a little grotto of Antiparos. 
Some old rough rails and boards that dropped 



138 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

over it are sheathed in plates of transparent 
silver. The trunks of the black alders are 
mailed with crystal ; and the witch-hazel and 
yellow osiers fringing its sedgy borders are like- 
wise shining through their glossy covering. 
Around every stem that rises from the water is 
a glittering ring of ice. The tags of the alder 
and the red berries of last summer's wild roses 
glitter now like a lady's pendant. As for the 
brook, he is wide-awake and joyful ; and where 
the roof of sheet ice breaks away, you can see his 
yellow-brown waters rattling and gurgling among 
the stones as briskly as they did last July. Down 
he springs ! over the glossy-coated stone wall, 
throwing new sparkles into the fairy grotto 
around him ; and widening daily from melting 
snows, and such other godsends, he goes chatter- 
ing off under yonder mossy stone bridge, and we 
lose sight of him. It might be fancy, but it 
seemed that our watery friend tipped us a cheery 
wink as he passed, saying, " Fine weather, sir 
and madam ; nice times these ; and in April 
you 'U find us all right ; the flowers are making 
up their finery for the next season ; there 's to 
be a splendid display in a month or two." 

Trees in Neither are trees, as seen in winter, 
^" ^^' destitute of their own peculiar beauty. 
If it be a gorgeous study in summer-time to 
watch the play of their abundant foliage, we still 
may thank winter for laying bare before us the 
grand and beautiful anatomy of the tree, with all 



NATURE. 139 

its interlacing network of boughs, knotted on 
each twig with the buds of next year's promise. 
The fleecy and rosy clouds look all the more 
beautiful through the dark lace veil of yonder 
magnificent elms; and the down-drooping dra- 
pery of yonder willow hath its own grace of out- 
line as it sweeps the bare snows. And the comi- 
cal old apple-trees, why, in summer they look 
like so many plump, green cushions, one as much 
like another as possible ; but under the revealing 
light of winter every characteristic twist and 
jerk stands disclosed. 

One might moralize on this, — how affliction, 
which strips us of all ornaments and accessories, 
and brings us down to the permanent and solid 
wood of our nature, develops such wide differ- 
ences in people who before seemed not much 
distinct. 

Winter The cloud lights of a wintry sky have 
clouds. ^ ^j^^^ purity and brilliancy that no 
other months can rival. The rose tints, and the 
shading of rose tint into gold, the flossy, filmy 
accumulation of illuminated vapor that drifts 
across the sky in a January afternoon, are beau- 
ties far exceeding those of summer. 



AGNES OF SORRENTO. 



Natural There is always something of elevation 
e?evSi^n. and purity that seems to come over one 



140 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

from being in an elevated region. One feels 
morally as well as physically above the world, 
and from that clearer air able to look down on 
it calmly, with disengaged freedom. 

The sum- Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair 
suvius. ^" villages and villas garlanded with roses 
and flushing with grapes whose juice 
gains warmth from the breathing of its subter- 
raneous fires, while just above them rises a region 
more awful than can be created by the action of 
any common causes of sterility. There, immense 
tracts sloping gradually upward show a desola- 
tion so peculiar, so utterly unlike every common 
solitude of nature, that one enters upon it with 
the shudder we give at that which is wholly un- 
natural. On all sides are gigantic serpent convo- 
lutions of black lava, their immense folds rolled 
into every conceivable contortion, as if, in their 
fiery agonies, they had struggled, and wreathed 
and knotted together, and then grown cold and 
black with the imperishable signs of those terrific 
convulsions upon them. Not a blade of grass, 
not a flower, not even the hardiest lichen, springs 
up to reheve the utter deathhness of the scene. 
The eye wanders from one black, shapeless mass 
to another, and there is ever the same sugges- 
tion of hideous monster life — of goblin convul- 
sions and strange fiend-like agonies in some age 
gone by. One's very footsteps have an unnatu- 
ral, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing 
over the rough surface are torn and fretted by its 



NATURE. 141 

sharp, remorseless touch, as if its very nature 
were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest con- 
tact revealed it. 



UNCLE TOM's cabin. 

The morn- Calmly the rosy hue of dawn was steal- 
ing s ar. .^g j^^^ ^j^^ room. The morning star 

stood, with its solemn, holy eye of light, looking 
down on the man of sin, from out the brighten- 
ing sky. Oh, with what freshness, what solem- 
nity and beauty, is each new day born ; as if to 
say to insensate man, " Behold ! thou hast one 
more chance ! Strive for immortal glory ! " 



DEED. 

A Southern The day had been sultry, and it was 
showerr iiow an hour or two past midnight, when 
a thunder-storm, which had long been 
gathering and muttering in the distant sky, began 
to develop its forces. 

A low shivering sigh crept through the woods, 
and swayed in weird whistlings the tops of the 
pines ; and sharp arrows of lightning came glit- 
tering down among the darkness of the branches, 
as if sent from the bow of some warlike angel. 
An army of heavy clouds swept in a moment 
across the moon ; then came a broad, dazzling, 
blinding sheet of flame, concentrating itself on the 



142 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

top of a tall pine near where Dred was standing, 
and in a moment shivered all its branches to the 
ground as a child strips the leaves from a twig. . . . 

The storm, which howled around him, bent the 
forest like a reed, and large trees, uprooted from 
the spongy and tremulous soil, fell crashing with 
a tremendous noise ; but, as if he had been a 
dark spirit of the tempest, he shouted and ex- 
ulted. . . . 

Gradually the storm passed by ; the big drops 
dashed less and less frequently ; a softer breeze 
passed through the forest, with a patter like the 
clapping of a thousand little wings ; and the 
moon occasionally looked over the silvery battle- 
ments of the great clouds. 

Nature's " Love is a mighty good ting, anyhow," 
^esson on ^^.^ rj^.g^ ^^ Lord brcss you, Miss Nina, 

it makes eberyting go kind o' easy. 
Sometimes when I 'm studding upon dese yer 
tings, I says to myself, 'pears like de trees in de 
wood, dey loves each oder. Dey stands kind 
o' lockin' arms so, and dey kind o' nod der 
heads, and whispers so ! 'Pears like de grape- 
vines and de birds, and all dem ar tings, dey 
lives comfortable togeder, like dey was peaceable 
and liked each oder. Now, folks is apt to get a- 
stewin' an' a-frettin' round, an' turnin' up der 
noses at dis yer ting, an' dat ar ; but 'pears like 
de Lord's works takes eberyting mighty easy. 
Dey jest kind o' lives along peaceable. I tink 
it 's mighty 'structive I " 



NATURE. 143 



PALMETTO LEAVES. 

Winter, In New England, Nature is an up-and- 
Soutb. ^" down, smart, decisive house-mother, that 
has her times and seasons, and brings up 
her ends of life with a positive jerk. She will 
have no shilly-shally. When her time comes, she 
clears off the gardens and forests thoroughly and 
once for all, and they are clean. Then she freezes 
the ground solid as iron, and then she covers all 
up with a nice, pure winding-sheet of snow, and 
seals matters up as a good housewife does her 
jelly-tumblers under white paper covers. There 
you are, fast and cleanly. If you have not got 
ready for it, so much the worse for you! If 
your tender roots are not taken up, your cellar 
banked, your doors listed, she can't help it ; it 's 
your own lookout, not hers. 

But Nature down here is an easy, demoralized, 
indulgent old grandmother, who has no particu- 
lar time for anything, and does everything when 
she happens to feel like it. "Is it winter, or 
is n't it ? " is the question likely often to occur in 
the settling month of December, when everybody 
up North has put away summer clothes, and put 
all their establishments under winter orders. 

The oiean- This bright morning we looked from 
the roof of our veranda, and our neigh- 
bor's oleander-trees were glowing like a great 
crimson cloud ; and we said, " There ! the olean- 



144 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

ders have come back ! " No Northern ideas can 
give the glory of these trees as they raise their 
heads in this their native land, and seem to be 
covered with great crimson roses. The poor 
stunted bushes of Northern greenhouses are as 
much like it as our stunted virtues and poor, 
frost-nipped enjoyments shall be like the bloom 
and radiance of God's Paradise hereafter. 

Moss. If you want to see a new and peculiar 
beauty, watch a golden sunset through a grove 
draperied with gray moss. The swaying, filmy 
bands turn golden and rose-colored, and the long, 
swaying avenues are Hke a scene in fairy-land. 

The right Every place, like a bit of tapestry, has 
the^\TO)ng. its right side and its wrong side ; and 
both are true and real, — the wrong 
side with its rags and tags, and seams and knots, 
and thrums of worsted, and the right side with 
its pretty picture. 



SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS. 

Beauty in " Turn off my eyes from beholding van- 
na ure. .^^^„ ^^^^ ^ good man, when he sees a 

display of graceful ornament. What, then, must 
he think of the Almighty Being, all whose useful 
work is so overlaid with ornament? There is 
not a fly's leg, not an insect's wing, which is not 
polished and decorated to an extent that we 



NATURE. 145 

should think positive extravagance in finishing 
up a child's dress. And can we suppose that 
this Being can take delight in dwellings and 
modes of life and forms of worship where every- 
thing is reduced to cold, naked utility ? I think 
not. The instinct to adorn and beautify is from 
Him ; it likens us to Him, and if rightly under- 
stood, instead of bemg a siren to beguile our 
hearts away, it will be the closest affiliating 
band. 

Flowers. There is a strange, unsatisfying pleas- 
ure about flowers, which, like all earthly pleas- 
ures, is akin to pain. What can you do with 
them ? — you want to do something, but what ? 
Take them all up and carry them with you? 
You cannot do that. Get down and look at 
them ? What, keep a whole caravan waiting for 
your observation ? That wHl never do. Well, 
then, pick and carry them along with you. That 
is what, in despair of any better resource, I 
did. ... It seemed almost sacrilegious to tear 
away such fanciful creations, that looked as if 
they were votive offerings on an altar, or, more 
likely, living existences, whose only conscious life 
was a continual exhalation of joy and praise. 

These flowers seemed to me to be the Earth's 
raptures and aspirations, — her better moments 
— her lucid intervals. Like everything else in 
our existence, they are mysterious. 

In what mood of mind were they conceived by 
the great Artist ? Of what feelings of His are 



146 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

they the expression, — springing up out of the 
dust, in the gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, 
where one would think the sense of His almight- 
iness might overpower the soul ? Born in the 
track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem 
to say to us that this Almighty Being is very 
pitiful, and of tender compassion; that, in His 
infinite soul, there is an exquisite gentleness and 
love of the beautiful, and that, if we would be 
blessed, His will to bless is infinite. 



Mountain I look at the strange, old, cloudy moun- 
*^' tains, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, the 

Schreckhorn. A kind of hazy ether floats around 
them — an indescribable aerial halo •^— which no 
painter ever represents. Who can paint the air, 
— that vivid blue in which these sharp peaks cut 
their glittering images ? 

The mys- I like best these snow-pure glaciers seen 
na"^e."^ through these black pines ; there is 
something mysterious about them when 
you thus catch glimpses, and see not the earthly 
base on which they rest. I recollect the same 
fact in seeing the cataract of Niagara through 
trees, where merely the dizzying fall of water 
was visible, with its foam, and spray, and rain- 
bow ; it produced an idea of something super- 
natural. ... 

Every prospect loses by being made definite. 
As long as we only see a thing by glimpses, and 
imagine that there is a deal more that we do not 



NATURE. 147 

see, the mind is kept in a constant excitement 
and play ; but come to a point where you can 
fairly and squarely take in the whole, and there 
your mind falls listless. It is the greatest proof, 
to me, of the infinite nature of our minds, that 
we almost instantly undervalue what we have 
thoroughly attained. ... I remember once, after 
finishing a very circumstantial treatise on the 
nature of heaven, being oppressed with a similar 
sensation of satiety, — that which hath not entered 
the heart of man to conceive must not be mapped 
out, — hence the wisdom of the dim, indefinite 
imagery of the Scriptures ; they give you no hard 
outline, no definite limit ; occasionally they part 
as do the clouds around these mountains, giving 
you flashes and gleams of something supernatural 
and splendid, but never fully unveiling. 

Cloud land- It is odd, though, to look at those cloud- 
scapes. caperings; quite as interestmg, in its 
way, as to read new systems of transcendental 
philosophy, and perhaps quite as profitable. 
Yonder is a great white-headed cloud, slowly 
unrolling himself in the bosom of a black pine 
forest. Across the other side of the road a huge 
granite cliff has picked up a bit of gauzy silver, 
which he is winding around his scraggy neck. 
And now, here comes a cascade, right over our 
heads ; a cascade, not of water, but of cloud ; 
for the poor little brook that makes it faints away 
before it gets down to us ; it falls like a shimmer 
of moonlight, or a shower of powdered silver, 



148 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

■while a tremulous rainbow appears at uncertain 
intervals, like a half-seen spirit. 

A cascade. The cascade here, as in mountains gen- 
erally, is a never-failing source of life and 
variety. Water, joyous, buoyant son of Nature, 
is calling to you, leaping, sparkling, mocking at 
you between bushes, and singing as he goes down 
the dells. A thousand little pictures he makes 
among the rocks as he goes. 

Phases of There are phases in nature which cor- 
na*^e. respond to every phase of human 
thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy 
scenery [in the Alps] answers to the melancholy 
fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred 
mournfulness of the book of Job. 

Sublimity Coming down I mentally compared Mont 
m nature, ^gj^^j^^ .^jr^^ Niagara, as one should com- 
pare two grand pictures in different styles of the 
same master. Both are of that class of things 
which mark eras in a mind's history, and open a 
new door which no man can shut. Of the two, 
I think Niagara is the more impressive, perhaps 
because those aerial elements of foam and spray 
give that vague and dreamy indefiniteness of 
outline which seems essential in the sublime. For 
this reason, while Niagara is equally impressive 
in the distance, it does not lose on the nearest 
approach, — it is always mysterious, and there- 
fore stimulating. Those varying spray-wreaths, 



NATURE. 149 

rising like Ossian's ghosts from its abyss ; those 
shimmering rainbows, through whose veil you 
look ; those dizzying falls of water that seem like 
clouds poured from the hollow of God's hand; 
and that mystic undertone of sound that seems 
to pervade the whole being as the voice of the 
Almighty, — all these bewilder and enchant the 
discriminating and prosaic part of us, and bring 
us into that cloudy region of ecstasy where the 
soul comes nearest to Him whom no eye has seen 
or can see. I have sometimes asked myself if, 
in the countless ages of the future, the heirs of 
God shall ever be endowed by Him with a crea- 
tive power, by which they shall bring into being 
things like these ? In this infancy of his exist- 
ence, man creates pictures, statues, cathedrals ; 
but when he is made " ruler over many things," 
will his Father intrust to him the building and 
adorning of worlds ? the ruling of the glorious, 
dazzling forces of nature ? 

Mountain Everybody knows, even in our sober 
rooks. j^ew England, that mountain brooks are 
a frisky, indiscreet set, rattling, chattering, and 
capering, in defiance of all law and order, tum- 
bling over precipices and picking themselves up 
at the bottom, no whit wiser or more disposed to 
be tranquil than they were at the top ; in fact, 
seeming to grow more mad and frolicsome with 
every leap. Well, that is just the way brooks 
do here in the Alps. 



150 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Alpine air. The whole air seemed to be surcharged 
with tints, ranging between the palest rose and 
the deepest violet — tints never without blue, 
and never without red, but varying in the degree 
of the two. It is this prismatic hue, diffused over 
every object, which gives one of the most notice- 
able characteristics of the Alpine landscape. 

Color- I have seen sometimes, in spring, set 
^* against a deep-blue sky, an array of 
greens, from lightest yellow to deepest blue of 
the pines, tipped and glittering with the after- 
noon sun, yet so swathed in some invisible, har- 
monizing medium, that the strong contrasts of 
color jarred upon no sense. All seemed to be 
bound by the invisible cestus of some celestial 
Venus. Yet what painter would dare attempt 
the same ? 

Nature's Mountains are nature's testimonials of 
^^^^ * anguish. They are the sharp cry of a 
groaning and travailing creation. Nature's stern 
agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of 
gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags 
stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, exist- 
ing verdureless and stern because exist they 
must. In them, hearts that have ceased to 
rejoice, and have learned to suffer, find kindred, 
and here an earth worn with countless cycles of 
sorrow utters to the stars voices of speechless 
despair. 



NATURE. 151 

Pines. I always love pines, to all generations. 
I welcome this solemn old brotherhood, which 
stand gray-bearded, like monks, old, dark, sol- 
emn, sighing a certain mournful sound — like a 
benedicite through the leaves. 



POGANUC PEOPLE. 

New Eng- But at last — at last — spring did come 
land spring. ^^ p^ganuc ! This marvcl and mystery 
of the new creation did finally take place there 
every year, in spite of every appearance to the 
contrary. Long after the bluebird that had 
sung the first promise had gone back into his own 
celestial ether, the promise that he sang was ful- 

fiUed. 

Like those sweet, foreseeing spirits, that on 
high, bare tree-tops of human thought, pour 
forth songs of hope in advance of their age and 
time, our bluebird was gifted with a sure spirit 
of prophecy ; and, though the winds were angry 
and loud, though snows lay piled and deep for 
long weeks after, though ice and frost and hail 
armed themselves in embattled forces, yet the 
sun behind them all kept shining and shining, 
every day longer and longer, every day drawing 
nearer and nearer, till the snows passed away 
like a bad dream, and the brooks woke up and 
began to laugh and gurgle, and the ice went out 
of the ponds. Then the pussy-wiUows threw out 
their soft catkins, and the ferns came up with 



152 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

their woolly hoods on, like prudent old house- 
mothers, looking to see if it was yet time to 
unveil their tender greens, and the white blos- 
soms of the shad-blow and the tremulous tags of 
the birches and alders shook themselves gayly 
out in the woods. Then, under brown, rustling 
leaf-banks, came the white, waxy shells of the 
trailing arbutus with its pink buds, fair as a win- 
ter's dawn on snow ; the blue and white hepati- 
cas opened their eyes, and cold, sweet, white vio- 
lets starred the moist edges of water-courses, and 
great blue violets opened large eyes in the shad- 
ows, and the white and crimson trilliums xm- 
furled under the flickering lace-work shadows of 
the yet leafless woods ; the red columbine waved 
its bells from the rocks, and great tufts of golden 
cowslips fringed the borders of the brooks. 
Then came in flocks the delicate wind-flower 
family ; anemones, starry white, and the crow- 
foot, with its pink outer shell, and the spotted 
adder's tongue, with its waving yellow bells of 
blossom. Then, too, the honest, great, green 
leaves of the old skunk-cabbage, most refreshing 
to the eye in its hardy, succulent greenness, 
though an abomination to the nose of the ill-in- 
formed who should be tempted to gather them. 
In a few weeks, the woods, late so frozen, — 
hopelessly buried in snow-drifts, — were full of a 
thousand beauties and delicacies of life and mo- 
tion, and flowers bloomed on every hand. 



NATURE. 153 

Autumn. The bright days of summer were a 
short-lived joy at Poganuc. One hardly had 
time to say " How beautiful ! " before it was 
past. By September came the frosty nights 
that turned the hills into rainbow colors, and 
ushered in Autumn, with her gorgeous robes of 
golden-rod and purple asters. There was still 
the best of sport for the children, however ; for 
the frost ripened the shagbark walnuts and 
opened the chestnut burrs, and the glossy brown 
chestnuts dropped down among the rustling yel- 
low leaves and the beds of fringed blue gentian. 
. . . Here and there groups of pines and tall 
hemlocks, with their heavy background of sol- 
emn green, threw out the flamboyant tracery of 
the forest in startling distinctness. Here and 
there, as they passed a bit of low land, the 
swamp maple seemed really to burn like crimson 
flame, and the clumps of black alder, with their 
vivid scarlet berries, exalted the effect of color 
to the very highest and most daring result. No 
artist ever has ventured to put on canvas the 
exact copy of the picture that Nature paints for 
us every year in the autumn months. There 
are things the Almighty Artist can do that no 
earthly imitator can more than hopelessly ad- 
mire. 

Bird-talk. Who shall interpret what is meant by 
the sweet jargon of robin and oriole and bobo- 
link, with their endless reiterations ? Some- 
thing wiser, perhaps, than we dream of in our 
lower life here. 



154 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW. 

NewEng. By and by the sun took to getting up 
ter. ^"^ later and later, setting a dreadfully bad 
example, it is to be confessed. It 
would be seven o'clock and after before he would 
show his red face above the bed-clothes of clouds 
away off in the southeast ; and when he did 
manage to get up, he was so far off and so chilly 
in his demeanor that people seemed scarcely a 
bit the better for him ; and by half-past four in 
the afternoon he was down in bed again, tucked 
up for the night, never caring what became of 
the world. And so the clouds were full of snow, 
as if a thousand white feather-beds had been 
ripped up over the world ; and all the frisky 
winds came out of their dens, and great frolics 
they had, blowing and roaring and careering in 
the clouds, — now bellowing down between the 
mountains, as if they meant to tear the world to 
pieces, then piping high and shrill, first round 
one corner of the farm-house, and then round 
the other, rattling the windows, bouncing against 
the doors, and then with one united chorus rum- 
bling, tumbling down the great chimney, as if 
they had a mind to upset it. Oh, what a frisky, 
rough, jolly, unmannerly set of winds they were ! 
By and by the snow drifted higher than the 
fences, and nothing was to be seen around the 
farm-house but smooth, waving hills and hollows 
of snow ; and then came the rain and sleet, and 



NATURE. 155 

froze them over with a slippery, shining crust, 
that looked as if the earth was dressed for the 
winter in a silver coat of maU. 



QUEER LITTLE PEOPLE. 



Summer There had been a patter of rain the 
^*^' night before, which had kept the leaves 

awake talking to each other tiQ nearly morning, 
but by dawn the small winds had blown brisk 
little pufEs, and had whisked the heavens clean 
and bright with their tiny wings, as you have 
seen Susan clear away the cobwebs in your 
mamma's parlor ; and so now there were left 
only a thousand blinking, burning water-drops, 
hanging like convex mirrors at the end of each 
leaf, and Miss Katy admired herself in each one. 



MY WIFE AND I. 

Lifluence The mutual acquaintance that comes to 
JoundSgs. companions in this solitude and face-to- 
face communion with nature is deeper 
and more radical than can come when surround- 
ed by the factitious circumstances of society. 
When the whole artificial world is withdrawn, 
and far out of sight, when we are surrounded 
with the pure and beautiful mysteries of nature, 
the very best and most genuine part of us comes 
to the surface, we know each other by the com- 
munion of our very highest faculties. 



156 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



RELIGIOUS POEMS. 



Summer "Why shouldst thou study in the month 

studies. n T 

01 June 
In dusky books of Greek and Hebrew lore, 
When the great Teacher of all glorious things 
Passes in hourly light before thy door ? 

There is a brighter book unrolling now ; 
Fair are its leaves as is the tree of heaven, 
All veined and dewed and gemmed with won- 
drous signs, 
To which a healing, mystic power is given. 

A thousand voices to its study call, 
From the fair hill-top, from the water-fall. 
Where the bird singeth, and the yellow bee, 
And the breeze talketh from the airy tree. 

Now is that glorious resurrection time 

When all earth's buried beauties have new birth ! 

Behold the yearly miracle complete, — 

God hath created a new heaven and earth ! 

Hast thou no tiTne for all this wondrous show, — 
No thought to spare ? Wilt thou forever be 
With thy last year's dry flower-stalk and dead 

leaves, 
And no new shoot or blossom on thy tree ? 

See how the pines push off their last year's leaves. 
And stretch beyond them with exultant bound : 



NATURE. 157 

The grass and flowers, with living power, o'er- 

grow 
Their last year's remnants on the greening 

ground. 

Wilt thou, then, all thy wintry feelings keep. 
The old dead routine of the book-writ lore. 
Nor deem that God can teach, by one bright hour, 
What life hath never taught to thee before ? 

Cease, cease to think, and be content to he y 
Swing safe at anchor in fair Nature's bay ; 
Reason no more, but o'er thy quiet soul 
Let God's sweet teachings ripple their soft way. 

Call not such hours an idle waste of time, — 
Land that lies fallow gains a quiet power ; 
It treasures, from the brooding of God's wings, 
Strength to unfold the future tree and flower. 

And when the summer's glorious show is past, 
Its miracles no longer charm thy sight. 
The treasured riches of those thoughtful hours 
Shall make thy wintry musings warm and bright. 



CHAPTER VII. 

LITERATURE AND ART. 
THE minister's WOOING. 

Romance. All prosaic and all bitter, disenchanted 
people talk as if poets and novelists made ro- 
mances. They do, just as much as craters make 
volcanoes, no more. What is romance ? Whence 
comes it ? Plato spoke to the subject wisely, in 
his quaint way, some two thousand years ago, 
when he said, "Man's soul, in a former state, 
was winged and soared among the gods : and 
so it comes to pass that, in this life, when the 
soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the 
sight of beauty, hath her remembrance quick- 
ened, forthwith there is a struggling and a prick- 
ing pain, as of wings trying to come forth, even 
as children in teething." And if an old heathen, 
two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely 
of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes 
it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a 
way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad- 
makers, romancers, and opera-singers ? 

Let us look up in fear and reverence, and say, 
" God is the great maker of romance ; He, from 
whose hand came man and woman, — He, who 



LITERATURE AND ART. 159 

strung the great harp of existence, — He is the 
great poet of life." Every impulse of beauty, of 
heroism, and every craving for purer love, fairer 
perfection, nobler type and style of being, than 
that which closes like a prison-house around us, 
in the dim, daily walk of life, is God's breath, 
God's impulse, God's reminder to the soul that 
there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to 
be attained. . . . 

The dullest street of the most prosaic town 
has matter in it for more smiles, more tears, 
more intense excitement, than ever were written 
in story or sung in poem ; the reality is there, of 
which the romance is the second-hand recorder. 



OLDTOWN FOLKS. 

Hebrew But it is a most remarkable property of 
this old Hebrew literature that it seems 
to be enchanted with a divine and living power, 
which strikes the nerve of individual conscious- 
ness in every desolate and suffering soul. It may 
have been Judah or Jerusalem agces asro to whom 
these words first came, but as they have traveled 
on for thousands of years, they have seemed to 
tens of thousands of sinking and desolate souls 
the voice of God to them individually. They have 
raised the burden from thousands of crushed 
spirits ; they have been as the day-spring to thou- 
sands of perplexed wanderers. Oh ! let us treas- 
ure these old words, for as of old Jehovah chose 



160 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

to dwell in a tabernacle in the wilderness, and 
between the cherubim in the temple, so now He 
dwells in them ; and to the simple soul that 
seeks for Him here, He will look forth as of old 
from the pillar of cloud and fire. 

Influence For my part, I am impatient of the 
Bible? theory of those who think that noth- 
ing that is not understood makes any 
valuable impression on the mind of a child. I 
am certain that the constant contact of the Bible 
with my childish mind was a very great mental 
stimulant, as it certainly was a cause of a singu- 
lar and vague pleasure. The wild, poetic parts 
of the prophecies, with their bold figures, vivid 
exclamations, and strange Oriental names and 
images, fiUed me with a quaint and solemn de- 
light. Just as a child brought up under the 
shadow of the great cathedrals of the Old World, 
wandering into them daily, at morning, or at 
eventide, beholding the many-colored windows, 
flamboyant with strange legends of saints and 
angels, and neither understanding the legends, 
nor comprehending the architecture, is yet stilled 
and impressed, till the old minster grows into his 
growth and fashions his nature, so this wonderful 
old cathedral book insensibly wrought a sort of 
mystical poetry into the otherwise hard and ster- 
ile life of New England. Its passionate Oriental 
phrases, its quaint, pathetic stories, its wild tran- 
scendent bursts of imagery, fixed an indelible 
mark in my imagination. ... I think no New 



LITEKATURE AND ART. 161 

Englander, brought up under the rSgime estab- 
lished by the Puritans, could really estimate how 
much of himself had actually been formed by 
this constant, face-to-face intimacy with Hebrew 
literature. 

The study I recommend everybody who wishes to 
tn^^e, try the waters of Lethe to study a new 
language, and learn to think in new 
forms ; it is like going out of one sphere of exist- 
ence into another. 

Greek. Greek is the morning land of languages, 
and has the freshness of early dew m it which 
will never exhale. 



THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND. 

The Bible. " This 'ere old Bible, — why it's jest 
like yer mother — ye rove and ramble and cut 
up round the world without her a spell, and 
mebbe think the old woman ain't so fashionable 
as some; but when sickness and sorrow comes, 
why there ain't nothin' else to go back to. Is 
there, now ? " 



HOUSE AlsD HOME PAPERS. 

Reading " But don't you think," said Marianne, 
amJiment. " that there is danger in too much, 
fiction ? " 



162 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

" Yes," said I. " But the chief danger of all 
that class of reading is its easiness, and the indo- 
lent, careless mental habit it induces. A great 
deal of the reading of young people on all days 
is really reading to no purpose, its object being 
merely present amusement. It is a Hstless yield- 
ing of the mind to be washed over by a stream 
which leaves no fertilizing properties, and carries 
away by constant wear the good soil of thought. 
I should try to estabhsh a barrier against this 
kind of reading, not only on Sunday, but on 
Monday, on Tuesday, and on all days. Instead, 
therefore, of objecting to any particular class of 
books for Sunday reading, I should say in gen- 
eral that reading merely for pastime, without any 
moral aim, is the thing to be guarded against. 
That which inspires no thought, no purpose, 
which steals away all our strength and energy, 
and makes the Sabbath a day of dreams, is the 
reading I would object to." 



Sacred " So of music. I do not see the pro- 
"^'^^^' priety of confining one's self to techni- 
cal sacred music. Any grave, solemn, thoughtful, 
or pathetic music has a proper relation to our 
higher spiritual nature, whether it be printed in 
a church service-book or on secular sheets. On 
me, for example, Beethoven's Sonatas have a far 
more deeply religious influence than much that 
has religious names and words. Music is to be 
judged of by its effects." 



LITERATURE AND ART. 163 

A good For a picture, painted by a real artist, 
pic ure. ^j^^ studies Nature minutely and con- 
scientiously, has something of the charm of the 
good Mother herself, — something of her faculty 
of putting on different aspects under different 
lights. 



PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY. 

Letters. Those long letters in which thoughtful 
people who live in retired situations delight ; let- 
ters, not of outward events, but of sentiments 
and opinions, the phases of the inner life. 



AGNES OF SORKENTO. 

The artist's What higher honor or grace can befall a 
creature than to be called upon to make 
visible to men that beauty of invisible things 
which is divine and eternal ? 

Hymns. " A hymn is a singing angel, and goes 
walking through the earth, scattering the dev- 
ils before it. Therefore he who creates hymns 
imitates the most excellent and lovely works of 
our Lord God, who made the angels. These 
hymns watch our chamber-door, they sit upon 
our pillow, they sing to us when we awake ; and 
therefore our master was resolved to sow the 
minds of his young people with them, as our 



164 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

lovely Italy is sown with the seeds of all-colored 
flowers." 

Music the There is no phase of the Italian mind 
oTnaiyf that has not found expression in its 
music. 

DEED. 

The univer- As the mind, looking on the great vol- 
ume of nature, sees there a reflection of 
its own internal passions, and seizes on that in 
it which sympathizes with itself, — as the fierce 
and savage soul delights in the roar of torrents, 
the thunder of avalanches, and the whirl of 
ocean-storms, — so is it in the great answering 
volume of revelation. There is something there 
for every phase of man's nature, and hence its 
endless vitality and stimulating force. 

Prophecy It is remarkable that in all ages, com- 

and Reve- •, • j • j' • i i ■li_ j^ 

lation. munities and mdividuais who nave sut- 
fered under oppression have always fled 
for refuge to the Old Testament and to the book 
of Revelation in the New. Even if not defi- 
nitely understood, these magnificent compositions 
have a wild, inspiring power, like a wordless, yet 
impassioned symphony, played by a sublime 
orchestra, in which deep and awful sub-bass in- 
struments mingle with those of ethereal softness, 
and wild minors twine and interlace with marches 
of battles and bursts of victorious harmony. 



LITERATURE AND ART. 165 

They are ranch mistaken who say that nothing 
is efficient as a motive that is not definitely under- 
stood. Who ever thought of understanding the 
mingled wail and roar of the Marseillaise ? Just 
this kind of indefinite stimulating power has the 
Bible to the souls of the oppressed. There is 
also a disposition, which has manifested itself 
since the primitive times, by which the human 
soul, bowed down beneath the weight of mighty 
oppressions, and despairing in its own weakness, 
seizes with avidity the intimations of a coming 
judgment, in which the Son of Man, appearing 
in His glory, and all His holy angels with Him, 
shall right earth's mighty wrongs. 



SUNNT MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS. 

The artist But, I take it, cvcry true painter, poet, 

as prophet. j .• . • • £ 

and artist is in some sense so tar a 
prophet that his utterances convey more to other 
minds than he himself knows ; so that, doubtless, 
should all the old masters rise from the dead, 
they might be edified by what posterity has 
found in their books. 

Difficulty Certainly no emotions so rigidly reject 
cism? ^' critical restraint and disdain to be bound 
by rule as those excited by the fine arts. 
A man unimpressible and incapable of moods and 
tenses is for that reason an incompetent critic ; 
and the sensitive, excitable man, how can he 



166 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

know that he does not impose his peculiar mood 
as a general rule ? 

Rembrandt I always did admire the gorgeous and 
thorne?^" solemn mysteries of his coloring. Rem- 
brandt is like Hawthorne. He chooses 
simple and every-day objects, and so arranges 
light and shadow as to give them a sombre rich- 
ness and mysterious gloom. " The House of 
the Seven Gables " is a succession of Rembrandt 
pictures, done in words instead of oils. Now, 
this pleases us, because our life really is a 
haunted one, the simplest thing in it is a mystery, 
the invisible world always lies around us like a 
shadow, and therefore this dreamy, golden gleam 
of Rembrandt meets somewhat in our inner con- 
sciousness to which it corresponds. . . . 

Rubens and I should compare Rubens to Shake- 
speare', speare, for the wonderful variety and 
vital force of his artistic power. I 
know no other mind he so nearly resembles. 
Like Shakespeare, he forces you to accept and 
to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own 
faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance 
the perfection of harmony. There certainly is 
some use, even in defects. A faultless style sends 
you to sleep. Defects rouse and excite the sen- 
sibility to seek and appreciate excellence. Some 
of Shakespeare's finest passages explode all 
grammar and rhetoric like sky-rockets — the 
thought blows the language to shivers. 



LITEKATUKE AND ART. 167 

Language I rejoice every hour that I am among 
Bible? these scenes in my familiarity with the 
language of the Bible. In it alone can 
I find vocabulary and images to express what 
this world of wonder excites. 

The effect As to Christianity not making men hap- 
tianity!^' picr, mcthinks M. Belloc forgets that 
the old Greek tragedies are filled with 
despair and gloom, as their prevailing character- 
istic, and that nearly all the music of the world 
before Christ was in the minor scale, as since 
Christ it has come to be in the major. The 
whole creation has, indeed, groaned and travailed 
in pain together until now, but the mighty an- 
them has modulated since the Cross, and the 
requiem of Jesus has been the world's birth-song 
of approaching jubilee. 

Music is a far better test, moreover, on such 
a point, than painting, for just where painting is 
weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest 
moral and spiritual ideas, there music is most 
sublimely strong. 



Real To me, all music is sacred. Is it not 

^^^ ' so ? All real music, in its passionate 
earnest, its blendings, its wild, heart-searching 
tones, is the language of aspiration. So it may 
not be meant; yet, when we know God, so we 
translate it. 



168 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Power of What is done from a genuine, strong, 
^tion. inward emotion, whether in writing or 
painting, always mesmerizes the paper 
or the canvas, and gives it a power which every- 
body must feel, though few know why. The 
reason why the Bible has been omnipotent, in all 
ages, has been because there were the emotions 
of God in it. 



POGANUC PEOPLE. 

Puritan As there is a place for all things in this 
great world of ours, so there was in its 
time and day a place and a style for Puritan 
music. If there were pathos and power and sol- 
emn splendor in the rhythmic movement of the 
churchly chants, there was a grand, wild freedom 
and energy of motion in the old " fuguing tunes " 
of that day that well expressed the heart of a 
people courageous in combat and unshaken in 
endurance. The church chant is like the meas- 
ured motion of the mighty sea in calm weather, 
but those old fuguing tunes were like that same 
ocean aroused by stormy winds, when deep call- 
eth unto deep in tempestuous confusion, out of 
which, at last, is evolved union and harmony. It 
was a music suggestive of the strife, the commo- 
tion, the battle-cries of a transition period of 
society, struggling onward toward dimly seen 
ideals of peace and order. 



LITERATURE AND ART. 169 



LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW. 



Books. No ornament of a house can compare 
with books ; they are constant company in a 
room, even when you are not reading them. 



MY WIB^ AND I. 

Our The only drawback when one reads 

mothers' poems that exactly express what one 
'^oxda. would like to say is that it makes us 
envious ; one thinks, why could n't I have said it 
thus? 

WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS. 

Books of St. John was seated in his study, with 

meditation. -lip t..- ^ n i* 

a book 01 meditations beiore him, on 
which he was endeavoring to fix his mind. In 
the hot, dusty, vulgar atmosphere of modern life, 
it was his daily effort to bring around himself 
the shady coolness, the calm, conventual stillness, 
that breathes through such writers as St. Francis 
de Sales and Thomas h Kempis, men with a 
genius for devotion, who have left to mankind 
records of the milestones and road-marks by 
which they traveled towards the highest things. 
Nor should the most stringent Protestant fail to 
honor that rich and grand treasury of the expe- 
rience of devout spirits of which the Romish 



170 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Church has been the custodian. The hymns and 
prayers and pious meditations which come to us 
through this channel are particularly worthy of a 
cherishing remembrance in this dusty, materialis- 
tic age. 

Hymns. "Words of piety, allied to a catching 
tune, are like seeds with wings — they float out 
in the air, and drop in the odd corners of the 
heart, to spring up in good purposes. 



CHAPTER Vni. 

NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 

THE minister's WOOING. 

Earnest- It is impossible to write a story of New 
NewEng^^ England life and manners for a thought- 
land peo- jggg shallow-minded person. If we 
pie. ' •*• 1 ' • 

represent things as they are, their in- 
tensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and 
earnestness must inevitably repel lighter spirits, 
as the reverse pole of the magnet drives off sticks 
and straws. In no other country were the soul 
and the spiritual life ever such intense realities, 
and everything contemplated so much (to use a 
current New England phrase) " in reference to 
eternity." 

New Eng- The rigid theological discipline of New 
wtheoi- England is fitted to produce rather 
strength and purity than enjoyment. It 
was not fitted to make a sensitive and thought- 
ful nature happy, however it might ennoble and 
exalt. 

The kitch- The kitchen of a New England matron 
®°* was her throne-room, her pride ; it was 



172 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

the habit of her life to produce the greatest pos- 
sible results there with the slightest possible dis- 
composure ; and what any woman could do, Mrs. 
Katy Scudder could do jpar excellence. Every- 
thing there seemed to be always done and never 
doing. Washing and baking, those formidable 
disturbers of the composure of families, were all 
over within those two or three morning hours 
when we are composing ourselves for a last nap, 
— and only the fluttering of linen over the green 
yard on Monday mornings proclaimed that the 
dreaded solemnity of a wash had transpired. A 
breakfast arose there as by magic ; and in an 
incredibly short space after, every knife, fork, 
spoon, and trencher, clean and shining, was look- 
ing as innocent and unconscious in its place as 
if it never had been used and never expected 
to be. 

The floor, — perhaps, sir, you remember your 
grandmother's floor of snowy boards sanded with 
whitest sand ; you remember the ancient fire- 
place stretching quite across one end, — a vast 
cavern, in each corner of which a cozy seat 
might be found, distant enough to enjoy the 
crackle of the great jolly wood fire ; across the 
room ran a dresser, on which was displayed 
great store of shining pewter dishes and platters, 
which always shone with the same mysterious 
brightness; by the side of the fire, a commodi- 
ous wooden settee, or " settle," offered repose to 
people too little accustomed to luxury to ask for 
a cushion. Oh, that kitchen of the olden time, 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 173 

— - the old, clean, roomy. New England kitchen ! 
Who that has breakfasted, dined, and supped in 
one, has not cheery visions of its thrift, its warmth, 
its coolness ? The noonmark on its floor was 
a dial that told off some of the happiest days ; 
thereby did we right up some of the shortcom- 
ings of the solemn old clock that tick-tacked in 
the corner, and whose ticks seemed mysterious 
prophecies of unknown good yet to arise out of 
the hours of life. How dreamy the winter twi- 
light came in there, — when as yet the candles 
were not lighted, — when the crickets chirped 
around the dark stone hearth, and shifting tongues 
af flame flickered and cast dancing shadows and 
elfish lights on the walls, while grandmother nod- 
ded over her knitting-work, and puss purred, and 
old Rover lay dreamily opening now one eye and 
then the other on the family group ! With all 
our ceiled houses, let us not forget our grand- 
mother's kitchen. 

Faculty. She was one of the much admired class, 
who, in the speech of New England, are said 
to have faculty, a gift which, among that shrewd 
people, commands more esteem than beauty, 
riches, learning, or any other worldly endow- 
ment. Faculty is Yankee for savoir faire, and 
the opposite virtue to shiftlessness. Faculty is 
the greatest virtue, and shiftlessness the great- 
est vice, of Yankee men and women. To her 
who has faculty nothing shall be impossible. She 
shall scrub floors, wash, wring, bake, brew, and 



174 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

yet her hands shall be small and white ; she 
shall have no perceptible income, yet always be 
handsomely dressed ; she shall have not a ser- 
vant in her house, — with a dairy to manage, 
hired men to feed, a boarder or two to care for, 
unheard-of pickling and preserving to do, — and 
yet you commonly see her every afternoon sit- 
ting at her shady parlor-window behind the lilacs, 
cool and easy, hemming muslin cap-strings, or 
reading the last new book. She who hath fac- 
ulty is never in a hurry, never behindhand. She 
can always step over to distressed Mrs. Smith, 
whose jelly won't come, — and stop to show 
Mrs. Jones how she makes her pickles so green, 
— and be ready to watch with poor old Mrs. 
Simpkins, who is down with the rheumatism. 

Garrets. Garrets are delicious places in any case, 
for people of thoughtful, imaginative tempera- 
ment. Who has not loved a garret in the twi- 
light days of childhood, with its endless stores 
of quaint, cast-off, suggestive antiquity, — old, 
worm-eaten chests, — rickety chairs, — boxes and 
casks full of odd comminglings, out of which, 
with tiny, childish hands, we picked wonderful 
hoards of fairy treasure ? "What peep-holes, 
and hiding-places, and undiscoverable retreats 
we made to ourselves, — where we sat rejoi- 
cing in our security, and bidding defiance to 
the vague, distant cry which summoned us to 
school, or to some unsavory every-day task ! 
How deliciously the rain came pattering on the 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 175 

roof over our head, or the red twilight streamed 
in at the window, while we sat snugly ensconced 
over the delicious pages of some romance which 
careful aunts had packed away at the bottom of 
all things, to be sure we should never read it ! 
If you have anything, beloved friends, which you 
wish your Charley or your Susy to be sure and 
read, pack it mysteriously away at the bottom 
of a trunk of stimulating rubbish in the darkest 
corner of your garret ; in that case, if the book 
be at all readable, — one that by any possible 
chance can make its way into a young mind, you 
may be sure that it will not only be read, but 
remembered to the longest day they have to live. 

ciearcut His was One of those clearly cut minds 
°^^ ' which New England forms among her 
farmers, as she forms quartz crystals in her 
mountains, by a sort of gradual influence flow- 
ing through every pore of the soil and system. 



OLDTOWN FOLKS. 

NewEng- Ncw England has been to the United 
parent of States what the Dorian hive was to 
the West. Qroece. It has always been a capital 
country to emigrate from, and North, South, 
East, and West have been populated largely from 
New England, so that the seed-bed of New Eng- 
land was the seed-bed of the great American 
republic, and of all that is likely to come of it. 



176 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

Rough Any one that has ever pricked his fin- 
gers in trying to force open a chestnut- 
burr may perhaps have moralized at the satin 
lining, so smooth and soft, that lies inside of that 
sharpness. It is an emblem of a kind of nature 
very frequent in New England, where the best 
and kindest and most desirable of traits are 
enveloped in an outside wrapping of sharp 
austerity. 

The do- Every New England village, if you 
mg- ^j^iy ^i^{jq\^ Qf {i^ must have its do-noth- 
ing, as regularly as it has its school-house or its 
meeting-house. Nature is always wide awake in 
the matter of compensation. Work, thrift, and 
industry are such an incessant steam-power in 
Yankee life that society would burn itself out 
with the intense friction, were there not inter- 
posed here and there the lubricating power of 
a decided do-nothing, — a man who won't be 
hurried, and won't work, and will take his ease 
in his own way, in spite of the whole protest of 
his neighborhood to the contrary. And there is 
on the face of the whole earth no do-nothing 
whose softness, idleness, general inaptitude to 
labor, and everlasting, universal shiftlessness, 
can compare with that of the worthy, as found 
in a brisk Yankee village. 

Life an People have often supposed, because the 

interest."^ Puritans founded a society where there 

were no professed public amusements, 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 177 

that therefore there was no fun going on in the 
ancient land of Israel, and that there were no 
cakes and ale, because they were virtuous. They 
were never more mistaken in their lives. There 
was an abundance of sober, well-considered mer- 
riment, and the hinges of life were well-oiled 
with that sort of secret humor which to this day 
gives the raciness to real Yankee wit. Besides 
this, we must remember that life itself is the 
greatest possible amusement to people who really 
believe they can do much with it, — who have 
that intense sense of what can be brought to pass 
by human effort that was characteristic of the 
New England colonies. To such, it is not exactly 
proper to say that life is an amusement, but it 
certainly is an engrossing interest, that takes the 
place of all amusements. 

New Eng- In the little theocracy which the Pil- 
ity. ^ ^' grims established in the wilderness, the 
ministry was the only order of nobility. 
They were the only privileged class, and their 
voice it was that decided ex cathedra on all ques- 
tions both of church and state, from the choice 
of governor to that of district school teacher. 

Our minister, as I remember him, was one of 
the cleanest, most gentlemanly, most well-bred of 
men, — never appearing without all the decorums 
of silk stockings, shining knee and shoe buckles, 
well-brushed shoes, immaculately powdered wig, 
out of which shone his clear, calm, serious face, 
like the moon out of a fleecy cloud. 



178 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND. 

A ship- In the plain, simple regions we are 
conunu? describing, — where the sea is the great 
"^*y* avenue of active life, and the pine for- 

ests are the great source of wealth, — ship-build- 
ing is an engrossing interest, and there is no fete 
that calls forth the community like the launching 
of a vessel. 

And no wonder ; for what is there belonging 
to this workaday world of ours that has such 
a never-failing fund of poetry and grace as a 
ship ? A ship is a beauty and mystery wherever 
we see it : its white wings touch the region of 
the unknown and the imaginative ; they seem to 
us full of the odors of quaint, strange, foreign 
shores, where life, we fondly dream, moves in 
brighter currents than the muddy, tranquil tides 
of every day. 

Who that sees one bound outward, with her 
white breasts swelling and heaving, as if with 
a reaching expectancy, does not feel his heart 
swell with a longing impulse to go with her to 
the far-off shores? Even at dingy, crowded 
wharves, amid the stir and tumult of great cities, 
the coming in of a ship is an event that can 
never lose its interest. But on these romantic 
shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, 
and the blue sea lies embraced in the arms of a 
dark, solitary forest, the sudden incoming of a 
ship from a distant voyage is a sort of romance. 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 179 

. . . The very life and spirit of strange, roman- 
tic lands come with her ; suggestions of sandal- 
wood and spice breathe through the pine woods ; 
she is an Oriental queen, with hands full of mys- 
tical gifts ; "all her garments smell of myrrh 
and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they 
have made her glad." No wonder men have 
loved ships like birds, and that there have been 
found brave, rough hearts that in fatal wrecks 
chose rather to go down with their ocean love 
than to leave her in the last throes of her death- 
agony. 

A ship-building, a ship-sailing community has 
an unconscious poetry ever underlying its exist- 
ence. Exotic ideas from foreign lands relieve 
the trite monotony of life ; the ship-owner lives 
in communion with the whole world, and is less 
likely to fall into the petty conmionplaces that 
infest the routine of inland life. 

Repression. There is a class of people in New Eng- 
land who betray the uprising of the softer feel- 
ings of our nature only by an increase of out- 
ward asperity — a sort of bashfulness and shyness 
leaves them no power of expression for these 
unwonted guests of the heart — they hurry them 
into inner chambers and slam the doors upon 
them, as if they were vexed at their appearance. 



The Sab- A vague, dream-like sense of rest and 

Sabbath stillness seemed to brood in the 

air. The very spruce-trees seemed to know that 



180 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

it was Sunday, and to point solemnly upward 
with their dusky fingers, and the small tide- 
waves that chased each other up on the sheUy 
beach, or broke against projecting rocks, seemed 
to do it with a chastened decorum, as each blue- 
haired wave whispered to his brother, " Be still 
— be still." . . . 

Not merely as a burdensome restraint, or a 
weary endurance came the shadow of that Puri- 
tan Sabbath. It brought with it all the sweet- 
ness that belongs to rest, all the sacredness that 
hallows home, all the memories of patient thrift, 
of sober order, of chastened yet intense family 
feeling, of calmness, of purity, and self-respect- 
ing dignity, which distinguished the Puritan 
household. It seemed a solemn pause in aU the 
sights and sounds of earth. 

Early New The State of Society in some of the dis- 
Bo^fety. tricts of Maine, in these days, much 
resembled, in its spirit, that which 
Moses labored to produce in ruder ages. It was 
entirely democratic, simple, grave, hearty, and 
sincere, — solemn and religious in its daily tone, 
and yet, as to all material good, full of whole- 
some thrift and prosperity. Perhaps taking the 
average mass of the people, a more healthful and 
desirable state of society never existed. Its bet- 
ter specimens had a simple, Doric grandeur, 
unsurpassed in any age. 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 181 



THE MAYFLOWER. 

Atypical Did you ever see the little village of 
landviuage. Newbiuy, in New England ? I dare 
say you never did; for it was just one 
of those out-of-the-way places where nobody ever 
came unless they came on purpose : a green little 
hollow, wedged like a bird's nest between half a 
dozen high hills, that kept off the wind and kept 
out foreigners ; so that the little place was as 
straitly sui generis as if there were not another 
in the world. The inhabitants were all of that 
respectable old steadfast family who made it a 
point to be bom, bred, married, die, and be bur- 
ied, all in the self-same spot. There were just so 
many houses, and just so many people lived in 
them ; nobody ever seemed to be sick, or to 
die either, at least while I was there. The na- 
tives grew old till they could not grow any older, 
and then they stood stUl, and lasted, from gener- 
ation to generation. There was, too, an unchange- 
ability about all the externals of Newbury. Here 
was a red house, and there a brown house, and 
across the way was a yellow house ; and there 
was a straggling rail fence or a tribe of mullein 
stalks between. The minister lived here, and 
Squire Moses lived there, and Deacon Hart lived 
under the hill, and Messrs. Nadab and Abihu 
Peters lived by the cross-road, and the old " Wid- 
der Smith " lived by the meeting-house, and 
Ebenezer Camp kept a shoemaker's shop on one 



182 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

side, and Patience Mosely kept a milliner's shop 
in front ; and there was old Comfort Scran, who 
kept store for the whole town, and sold axe-heads, 
brass thimbles, licorice ball, fancy handkerchiefs, 
and everything else you can think of. Here, too, 
was the general post-office, where you might see 
letters marvelously folded, directed wrong side 
upwards, stamped with a thimble, and super- 
scribed to some of the Dollys, or Pollys, or 
Peters, or Moseses aforenamed or not named. 

For the rest, as to manners, morals, arts, and 
sciences, the people in Newbury always went to 
their parties at three o'clock in the afternoon, 
and came home before dark ; always stopped all 
work the minute the sun was down on Saturday 
night; always went to meeting on Sunday; had 
a schoolhouse with all the ordinary inconven- 
iences ; were in neighborly charity with one an- 
other, read their Bibles, feared their God, and 
were content with such things as they had, — 
the best philosophy after all. 

The farm- Everything in Uncle Abel's house was 

house. • i.1 J." 1 J 

m the same time, place, manner, and 
form, from year's end to year's end. There was 
old Master Bose, a dog after my uncle's, own 
heart, who always walked as if he were studying 
the multiplication table. There was the old 
clock, forever ticking in the kitchen corner, with 
a picture on its face of the sun forever setting 
behind a perpendicular row of poplar - trees. 
There was the never-failing supply of red pep- 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 183 

pers and onions hanging over the chimney. 
There, too, were the yearly hollyhocks and 
morning-glories blooming about the windows. 
There was the " best room," with its sanded 
floor, the cupboard in one corner with its glass 
doors, the evergreen asparagus bushes in the 
chimney, and there was the stand with the Bible 
and almanac on it in another corner. There, too, 
was Aunt Betsey, who never looked any older, 
because she always looked as old as she could ; 
who always dried her catnip and wormwood the 
last of September, and began to clean house the 
first of May. In short, this was the land of con- 
tinuance. Old Time never took it into his head 
to practice either addition, or subtraction, or mul- 
tiplication on its sum total. 



UNCLE TOM S CABIN. 

Conscience Nowhere is Conscience so dominant and 
England ull-absorbing as with New England 
women. women. It is the granite formation 
which lies deepest, and rises out even to the tops 
of the highest mountains. 



DEED. 

SeUing *' But these Yankees turn everything to 

their disad- . tp > n i i • j 

vantages, account. It a man s tield is covered 
with rock, he '11 find some way to sell it. 



184 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

and make money out of it ; and if tliey freeze 
up all winter, they sell the ice, and make money 
out of that. They just live by selling their dis- 
advantages ! " 

POGANUC PEOPLE. 

Yankee Zeph was a creature born to oppose, as 
^" ' much as white bears are made to walk 

on ice. 

And how, we ask, would New England's rocky 
soil and icy hills have been made mines of wealth 
unless there had been human beings born to 
oppose, delighting to combat and wrestle, and 
with an unconquerable power of will ? 

Zeph had taken a thirteen acre lot, so rocky 
that a sheep could scarce find a nibble there, 
had dug out and blasted and carted the rocks, 
wrought them into a circumambient fence, — 
ploughed and planted and raised crop after crop 
of good rye thereon. He did it with heat, with 
zeal, with dogged determination ; he did it all 
the more because neighbors said he was a fool 
for trying, and that he could never raise any- 
thing on that lot. There was a stern joy in 
this hand-to-hand fight with Nature. He got his 
bread as Samson did his honeycomb out of the 
aarcass of the slain lion. " Out of the eater 
came forth meat, and out of the strong came 
forth sweetness." Even the sharp March wind 
did not annoy him. It was a controversial wind, 
and that suited him ; it was fighting him all the 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 185 

way, and he enjoyed beating it. Such a human 
being has his place in the Creator's scheme. 

Religious They greatly mistake the New England 
rn^t.^^ rehgious development who suppose that 
it was a mere culture of the head in 
dry, metaphysical doctrines. As in the rifts of 
the granite rocks grow flowers of wonderful 
beauty and delicacy, so in the secret recesses of 
Puritan life, by the fireside of the farmhouse, in 
the contemplative silence of austere care and 
labor, grew up religious experiences that brought 
a heavenly brightness down into the poverty of 
commonplace existence. 

Family The custom of family worship was one 
wors ^p. ^£ ^YiQ most rigid inculcations of the 
Puritan order of society, and came down from 
parent to child with the big family Bible, where 
the births, deaths, and marriages of the house- 
hold stood recorded. 

In Zeph's case, the custom seemed to be 
merely an inherited tradition, which had dwin- 
dled into a habit purely mechanical. Yet, who 
shall say? 

Of a rugged race, educated in hardness, wring- 
ing his substance out of the very teeth and claws 
of reluctant nature, on a rocky and barren soil, 
and under a harsh, forbidding sky, who but the 
All-seeing could judge him ? In that hard soul, 
there may have been, thus uncouthly expressed, 
a loyalty to Something Higher, however dimly 



186 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

perceived. It was acknowledging that even he 
had his master. One thing is certain, the cus- 
tom of family prayers, such as it was, was a 
great comfort to the meek saint by his side, to 
whom any form of prayer, any pause from earthly 
care, and looking up to a Heavenly Power, was 
a blessed rest. In that daily toil, often beyond 
her strength, when she never received a word of 
sympathy or praise, it was a comfort all day to 
her to have had a chapter in the Bible and a 
prayer in the morning. Even though the chapter 
were one that she could not by any possibility un- 
derstand a word of, yet it put her in mind of things 
in that same dear book that she did understand, 
— things that gave her strength to live and hope 
to die by, — and it was enough ! Her faith in 
the Invisible Friend was so strong that she needed 
but to touch the hem of His garment. Even a 
table of genealogies out of His book was a sacred 
charm, an amulet of peace. 

TheMtch- The fire that illuminated the great 
p?ace. kitchen of the farmhouse was a splen- 

did sight to behold. It is, alas, with 
us, only a vision and memory of the past ; for 
who, in our days, can afford to keep up the 
great fireplace, where the backlogs were cut 
from the giants of the forest, and the forestick 
was as much as a modern man could lift ? And 
then the glowing fire-palace built thereon ! That 
architectural pile of split and seasoned wood, 
over which the flames leaped and danced and 



NEW ENGLAND LIFE. 187 

crackled like rejoicing genii — what a glory it 
was I The hearty, bright, warm hearth, in those 
days, stood instead of fine furniture and hand- 
some pictures. The plainest room becomes beau- 
tiful and attractive by firelight, and when men 
think of a country and home to be fought for and 
defended, they think of the fireside. 

The cur- Though not exactly backed by the arbi- 
trary power which enforced the cele- 
brated curfew, yet the nine o'clock bell was one 
of the authoritative institutions of New England ; 
and, at its sound, all obediently set their faces 
homeward, to rake up housefires, put out can- 
dles, and say their prayers before going to rest. 



MY WIFE AND I. 

Faculty. What Yankee matrons are pleased to 
denominate faculty, which is, being interpreted, 
a genius for home life. 



CHAPTER IX. 

MISCELLANEOUS. 

OLDTOWN FOLKS. 

The com- It takes some hours to get a room 
panyroom. ^g^^j^ where a family never sits, and 

which therefore has not in its walls one particle 
of the genial vitality which comes from the in- 
dwelling of hmnan beings. 

The turn When you get into a tight place, and 

of the tide. , i • • , . .n ., 

everythmg goes agamst you, till it 
seems as if you could not hold on a minute 
longer, never give up then, for that 's just the 
place and time that the tide '11 turn. 



SAM LAWSON S STORIES. 

Little "Some seem to think the Lord don't 
°^^' look out only for gret things ; but, ye 
see, little things is kind o' hinges that gret ones 
turns on. They say, take care o' pennies, an* 
dollars '11 take care o' themselves. It's jest so 
in everything ; and ef the Lord don't look arter 
little things. He ain't so gret as they say, any 
way." 



MISCELLANEOUS. 189 



LITTLE FOXES. 

Sincerity Truth before all things ; sincerity before 
tesy.*'°*"" all things ; pure, clean, diamond-bright 
sincerity is of more value than the gold 
of Ophir ; the foundation of aU love must rest 
here. How those people do who live in the 
nearest and dearest intimacy with friends who, 
they believe, will lie to them for any purpose, 
even the most refined and delicate, is a mystery 
to me. If I once know that my wife or my 
friend will tell me only what they think will be 
agreeable to me, then I am at once lost, my way 
is a pathless quicksand. But all this being pre- 
mised, I still say that we Anglo-Saxons might 
improve our domestic life, if we would graft 
upon the strong stock of its homely sincerity the 
courteous grace of the French character. 

Flattery. Flattery is insincere praise, given from 
interested motives, not the sincere utterance to 
a friend of what we deem good and lovely in 
him. 

HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS. 

Household In fact, nobody wanted to stay in our 
parlor now. It was a cold, correct, ac- 
complished fact ; the household fairies had left it, 
— and when the fairies leave a room, nobody 
ever feels at home in it. No pictures, curtains. 



190 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 

no wealth of mirrors, no elegance of lounges, can 
in the least make up for their absence. They 
are a capricious little set ; there are rooms where 
they will not stay, and rooms where they will, 
but no one can ever have a good time without 
them. 

SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS. 



Cathe- Cathedrals do not seem to me to have 
been built. They seem, rather, stupen- 
dous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of 
basalt. 



French Conversation of French circles seems to 
tion. me like gambols of a thistledown, or the 

rainbow changes in soap-bubbles. One 
laughs with tears in one's eyes. One moment 
confounded with the absolute childhood of the 
simplicity, in the next one is a little afraid of the 
keen edge of the shrewdness. 

TheGer- These Germans seem an odd race, a 
mans. mixture of clay and spirit — what with 
their beer-drinking and smoking, and their slow, 
stolid ways, you would think them perfectly 
earthy ; but ethereal fire is all the while work- 
ing in them, and bursting out in most unexpected 
little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms 
on a cactus. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 191 



MY WIFE AND I. 

Physiogno- Houses have their physiognomy as much 
hJmae.* as persons. There are commonplace 
houses, suggestive houses, attractive 
houses, mysterious houses, and fascinating houses, 
just as there are all these classes of persons. 
There are houses whose windows seem to yawn 
idly — to stare vacantly ; there are houses whose 
windows glower weirdly, and glance at you 
askance ; there are houses, again, whose very 
doors and windows seem wide open with frank 
cordiality, which seem to stretch their arms to 
embrace you, and woo you kindly to come and 
possess them. ... 

Is not this a species of high art, by which a 
house, in itself cold and barren, becomes in every 
part warm and inviting, glowing with suggestion, 
alive with human tastes and personalities ? Wall- 
paper, paint, furniture, pictures, in the hands of 
the home artist, are like the tubes of paint, out 
of which arises, as by inspiration, a picture. It 
is the woman who combines them into the won- 
derful creation which we call a home. 

When I came home from my office, night after 
night, and was led in triumph by Eva to view 
the result of her achievements, I confess I began 
to remember, with approbation, the old Greek 
mythology, and no longer to wonder that divine 
honors had been paid to household goddesses. 



192 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. 



LETTERS. 



Heaven. You do like to do good, and live a life 
worth living, and when you get to heaven you 
will always want to do exactly the thing by 
which you can best please the dear Lord. The 
fashions there in Heaven are set by Him who 
made himself of no reputation, and came and 
spent years among poor, ignorant, stupid, wicked 
people, that He might bring them up to himself, 
— and I dare say the saints are burning with 

zeal to be sent on such messages to our world, 

I don't think they " sit on every heavenly hill," 
paying compliments to each other, but they are 
flying hither and thither on messages of mercy 
to the dark, the desolate, the sorrowful. That 's 
the way you '11 be when you get there, and spite 
of all you say about yourself, you '11 get to liking 
that sort of work more and more here. 

Hjsown I shall be glad when he is in a house 
of his own, — a man is n't half a man 
till he is. 

FINIS. 



INDEX OF BOOKS. 



The MmisTER's Wooing, 1, 55, 

84, 105, 118, 134, 158, 171. 
Oldtown Folks, 13, 58, 89, 105, 

119, 135, 159, 175, 188. 
Sam Lawson's Stories, 60, 119, 

188. 
Pearl of Orr's Island, 19, 60, 

91, 108, 119, 161, 178. 
Little Foxes, 21, 62, 93, 121, 

189. 
House and Home Papers, 24, 65, 

95, 122, 161, 189. 
The Chimney Corner, 25, 66, 96, 

110, 123, 136. 
The Mayflower, 26, 67, 97, 110, 

124, 136, 181. 
Pink and White Tyranny, 29, 

69, 100, 112, 125, 163. 
Betty's Bright Idea, 32, 112. 
Deacon Pitkin's Farm, 32, 70, 

100. 



Agnes of Sorhbnto, 33, 71, 101, 

113, 126, 139, 163. 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 38, 72, 102, 

113, 126, 141, 183. 

Dred, 41, 73, 127, 141, 164, 183. 
Palmetto Leaves, 18, 103, 143. 
Sunny Memories of Foreign 

Lands, 45, 75, 114, 144, 165, 

190. 
PoGANUc People, 47, 76, 103, 114, 

151, 168, 184. 
Little Pussy WniLOW, 48, 76, 

114, 128, 154, 169. 

A Dog's Mission, 49, 78, 115, 128. 
Queer Little People, 77, 155. 
My Wife and 1, 49, 78, 103, 116, 

130, 155, 169, 187, 191. 
We and our Neighbors, 51, 80, 

104, 132, 169. 
Religious Poems, 52, 156. 
Letters, 192. 



INDEX OF TITLES. 



A boy's growth, 57. 

A busy-body, 77. 

A cascade, 148. 

Acceptable advice, 71. 

A child-like nature, 61. 

A child's crosses, 116. 

A child's defense, 113. 

A child's longing for sympathy, 

110. 
A child's love, 110. 
A child's philosophy, 107. 



A child's power, 111. 

A child's questions, 108. 

A common mode of reasoningi 

67. 
AflSnity of opposites, 26. 
Agony of uncertainty, 7. 
Agony in the voice, 36. 
A good picture, 103. 
A help-meet, 95. 
A lesson in faith, 19. 
" AU for the best," 33. 



194 



INDEX. 



Alpine air, 150. 

Altruism, 51. 

Altruistic faith, 21. 

Amusements, 17. 

A mutual education, 1 19. 

A natural education, 120. 

A New England woman, 70. 

Animal spirits, 76. 

Animation, 113. 

A perfect character, 97. 

Appreciating individuality, 132. 

A ship-building community, 178. 

A Southern thunder-shower, 141. 

Aspiration, 32. 

A sympathetic God, 36. 

A true home, 95. 

A typical New England village, 

181. 
Autumn, 153. 
A well-developed man, 123. 
A woman's view, 90. 

Baby's dreams, 112. 

Baiting the boy, 120. 

Beautiful old age, 102. 

Beauty in nature, 144. 

Bird-talk, 153. 

Blessedness vs. happiness, 3. 

" Blessings brighten as they take 

their flight," 73. 
" Bobservation," 126. 
Books, 169. 

Books of meditation, 169. 
Broken idols, 78. 

Candace's theology, 8. 
Capacity of feeling, 27. 
Careful observation, 65. 
Care inevitable to human nature, 

67. 
Cathedrals, 190. 
Character, 103. 

Characters worth exploring, 79. 
Chateaux en Espagne, 66. 
Child faith, 114. 
Child instinct, 105. 
Childish antipathies, 106. 
Child's buoyancy, 109. 
Child's intensity, 105. 
Child's mission, 113. 
Child's reasoning, 110. 
Clairvoyance, 31. 
Clear-cut thought, 175. 
Cloud landscapes, 147. 
Coincidence, 37. 
Color-blending, 150. 
Congeniality of opposites, 42. 



Connection with the spirit-world, 

44. 

Conscience in New England wo- 
men, 183. 

Control of the thoughts, 9. 

Convenient duties, 68. 

Conversation, 25. 

Coiirage, 133. 

Courage in the truth, 3. 

" Cuteness," 67. 

Danger in apparent safety, 68. 
Dangers of vanity, 125. 
Death in life, 8. 
Defective education, 118. 
Depression after exaltation, 56. 
Developing power of love, 11. 
Different temperaments, 108. 
Difficulty of confession, 76. 
Difficulty of criticism, 165. 
Difficulty of inspiring others, 34. 
Difficulty of self-knowledge, 62. 
Discipline, 12, 19. 
Discipline of patience, 49. 
Doing our own work, 133. 
Doubt, 50. 
Dreams, 35. 
Dual nature, 71. 
Duty vs. expediency, 57. 

Early New England society, 180. 
Earnestness of the New England 

people, 171. 
Educating boys for husbands, 

131. 
Education of man and woman, 

119. 
Effect of harshness, 73. 
Effect of sinning, 60. 
Eimobling power of sorrow, 50. 
Exaction, 102. 
Expression of love, 21. 
Expressive silence, 58. 

Faculty, 173, 187. 

Faith, not sight, 14. 

Family worship, 185. 

Fate, 110. 

Fine natures perverted, 75. 

First false step, 77. 

First principles of home-making, 

24. 
First steps, 74. 
Fitful persons, 20. 
Flattery, 189. 
Flaws in gems, 81. 
Flowers, 145. 



INDEX. 



195 



Forcing a daughter, 101. 

Forgiveness of friends, 51. 

French conversation, 190. 

French nature, 56. 

Friends, 50. 

Friendly gossip, 80. 

From different standpoints, 75. 

Garrets, 174. 

Gems, 136. 

Genial and ungenial natures, 69. 

Getting used to the world, 106. 

Girls' confidences, 93. 

God as an artist, 46. 

God's comfort, 53. 

God's cordials, 14. 

God's sympathj', 27. 

God's tests, 5. 

God working through man, 52. 

Good and evil inseparable, 74. 

Good wherever we seek it, 34. 

Gossip, 83. 

Grace in affliction, 45. 

Greek, 161. 

(growing alike, 70. 

Growth from within, 16. 

Habit, 118. 

Heart-wisdom vs. worldly wis- 
dom, 27. 
Heaven, 192. 
Heavenly chUdren, 116. 
Hebrew literature, 159. 
Heimweh, 19, 47. 
Help in sorrow, 26. 
Help from work, 51. 

Heredity, 79. 

His own house, 192. 

Hobbies, 115. 

Holiness of age, 15. 

Holiness of infancy, 108. 

Hohness of woman, 84. 

Home education, 122. 

Honoring mother, 127. 

Household fairies, 189. 

Human error, 118. 

Human nettles, 81. 

Hymns, 163, 170. 

Idealizing our work, 130. 
Idealizing power of love, 13. 
Idle talk, 88. 
Ignorant selfishness, 55. 
Immutability of nature's laws, 

132. 
Impossibility of evading trouble, 

82. 



IndividuaUty, 38, 90, 121. 
Individuality in children, 107. 
Inexplicable preferences, 42. 
Influence, 27. 

Influence of the invisible, 4. 
Influence of a mother's prayer, 

29. 
Influence of heredity and asso- 
ciations, 59. 
Influence of surroundings, 155. 

Influence of the Bible, 160. 

Inner life, 52. 

Innocence, 37. 

Inspiration, 38. 

Intemperance, 124. 

Intuition, 100. 

Inward peace, 45. 

" I told you so," 82. 

Joy in endurance, 44. 
Joy of living, 57. 

" Keep straight on," 119. 

Lack of religious instruction, 131. 

Language of the Bible, 167. 

Latent caloric, 22. 

Laws of prayer, 4. 

Learning to love, 25. 

Letters, 163. 

Letting go, 119. 

Life, 60. 

Life an engrossing interest, 176. 

Life as a play, 60. 

Life renewed, 18. 

Limitation, 20. 

Limit of responsibility, 130. 

Lme between right and wrong, 

50. 
Little things, 188. 
Living together, 28. 
Longing for love in the unlovely, 

47. 
Looking through blue glasses, 66. 
Lost confidence, 75. 
Lost innocence irrecoverable, 35. 
Love a sacrament, 5. 
Love a test, 21. 
Love of a bargain, 65. 
Love of solitude, 109. 

Making people like us, 67. 
Making the best of it, 59, 121. 
Man's childish impatience, 49. 
Marks of genius, 77. 
Maternal element in woman s 
love, 93. 



196 



INDEX. 



Meditations of the oak, 136. 

Memory, 9. 

Ministering spirits, 28. 

Minor modulations, 9. 

Mischief, 108. 

Miss Prissy's motto, 3. 

Modern saints, 94. 

Moral atmosphere, 39. 

Moral courage, 131. 

Moral earnestness, 13. 

Moral inheritance, 15. 

Morbid feelings, 64. 

Moss, 144. 

Mother-love for a son, 86. 

Mother pride, 112. 

Mother's inconsiderateness, 87. 

Mother's intuition, 88. 

Mother's work, 89. 

Mountain air, 146. 

Mountain brooks, 149. 

Music the language of Italy, 164. 

Naivete, 34. 

Natural and moral elevation, 139. 
Natural religious sensibility, 40. 
Nature's anguish, 150. 
Nature's lesson on love, 142. 
Need of home attractions, 122. 
Neighbors' influence, 91. 
Nervous sensibility, 37. 
New England nobility, 177. 
New England spring, 151. 
New England theology, 171. 
New England the parent of the 

West, 175. 
New England winter, 154. 
Night resolutions, 43. 

October in New England, 135. 
Opinionated people, 76. 
Orderliness, 104. 
Our Charley, 115. 
Our thoughts in others' words, 
169. 

Patient waiting, 126. 
Peace through suffering, 52. 
Perfect faith, 10. 
Perfection in little things, 123. 
Persistence, 72. 
Persistency, 81. 
Personal magnetism, 12, 59. 
Personality, 80. 
Phases of nature, 148. 
Physical good-humor, 60. 
Physiognomy of a house, 191. 
Pines, 151. 



Poetry and prose, 116. 
Power of a tone, 59. 
Power of an honest character, 71. 
Power of beauty, 70. 
Power of inward emotion, 168. 
Power of mind over body, 38. 
Power of real love, 85. 
Power of song, 43. 
Power of sympathy, 33. 
Practical and ideal, 41. 
Praise and blame, 52. 
Privileged truth-tellers, 68. 
Proof of heaven, 43. 
Prophecy and revelation, 164. 
Pure joy, 108. 
Puritan music, 168. 

Quiet children, 107. 

Reaction of harshness, 49. 

Reading only for amusement, 161. 

Real conversation, 104. 

Real love, 62. 

Real music, 167. 

Recreation, 121. 

Regret, 23. 

Relation of age to youth, 72. 

Religious development, 185. 

Religious instruction at home, 
124. 

Rembrandt and Hawthorne, 166. 

Repression, 5, 17, 87, 117, 179. 

Reproach, 51. 

Reserve, 91. 

Reserve not understood, 62. 

Restrictions of the body on the 
soul, 2. 

Responsibility, 11. 

Reverence the basis of faith, 88. 

Righteousness through repent- 
ance, 82. 

Right side of human nature, 81. 

Romance, 158. 

Rough exterior, 176. 

Rubens and Shakespeare, 166. 

Sacred music, 162. 
Saintliness, 25. 
Scepticism, 60. 
'Senses, 73. 
Seeing and feeling, 47. 
Seeing the bright side, 48. 
Self-deception, 1, 68. 
Self-forgetfulness, 40. 
Self-ignorance, 31. 
Selfish love, 58. 
Selfishness, 100. 



INDEX. 



197 



Self-sacrifice, 39. 

Sellii^ their disadvantages, 183. 

Sensitive natures, 110. 

Sensitiveness to blame, 55. 

Shadow, 46. 

Shyness of love, 64. 

Silence of deep emotion, 37. 

Silent companionship, 15. 

Silent influence, 127. 

Simple honesty vs. worldliness, 

56. 
Simplicity, 114. 
Sincerity and courtesy, 189. 
Sorrow an educator, 38. 
Sorrow a preparation for love, 

34. 
Soul-absorption, 2. 
Soul-communion, 1. 
Soul-growth, 12. 
Soul-language, 78. 
Soul-relation, 18. 
Soul-striving, 46. 
Speaking as a friend, 73. 
Starting right, 128. 
Starved faculties, 130. 
Streaked men, 74. 
Strength of despair, 39. 
Struggling for higher things, 14. 
Sublimity in nature, 148. 
Suffering in silence, 44. 
Summer rain, 155. 
Summer studies, 156. 
Simshine of the heart, 35. 
Superiority, 27. 
Superstition, 40. 
Suppression, 101. 
Sweetness, 92. 
Sympathy, 1, 18, 27, 31, 33. 
Sympathy through sorrow, 7. 

Tact, 93. 

Taught by suffering, 29. 

Teachings of suffering, 25. 

The artist as prophet, 165. 

The artist's mission, 163. 

The art of home-making, 96. 

The Bible, 161. 

The brook in winter, 137. 

The calm of God's love, 53. 

The child as teacher, 112. 

The company room, 188. 

The curfew, 187. 

The divine ideal, 10. 

The do-nothing, 176. 

The education of the parent, 122, 

The effect of Christianity, 167. 

The farmhouse, 182. 



The Germans, 190. 

The human soul, 41. 

The ideal and the practical, 9. 

The kitchen, 171. 

The kitchen fireplace, 186. 

The lesson of faith, 32. 

The morning star, l41. 

The mother in every woman, 89. 

The mysterious in nature, 146. 

The negro love of beauty, 72. 

The New England wife-mother, 

100. 
The object of life, 30. 
The odd one, 105. 
The oleander, 143. 
The reserve power of quietness, 

91. 
The right side and the wrong, 

144. 
The right way to study, 128. 
The Sabbath, 179, 
The sea, 134. 
The spirit within, 53. 
The strongest passions, 35. 
The study of anew language, 161. 
The summit of Vesuvius, 140. 
The siuirise, 135. 
The turning-point in life, 128. 
The turn of the tide, 188. 
The universal book, 164. 
The world's injustice, 57. 
Throwing away happiness, 64. 
Too much heart, 68. 
Transient uplifting, 36. 
Transition periods, 43. 
Trees in winter, 138. 
True beauty, 101. 
True courage, 91. 
True heroism, 39. 
True greatness, 130. 
Trust, 33. 

Truth told by an enemy, 132. 
"Turn about," 103. 
Two kinds of frankness, 69. 

Unacknowledged motives, 32. 
Unconscious heart-thrusts, 5. 
Undercurrent, 10. 
Unintended hurts, 61. 
Unity in conflict, 16. 
Unity in prayer, 7. 
Unperverted taste, 114. 
Unseen dangers, 109, 
Unsuspected danger, 79. 
Unsuspected influence, 11. 
Use of a chatterbox, 74. 
Using knowledge, 89. 



198 



INDEX, 



Value of ready expression, 75. 
Value of truth, 133. 

"Want of sympathy in nature, 134. 
■Warning for mothers, 65. 
What girls should be taught, 125. 
"What shall we do with Char- 
ley ? " 128. 
Will-power, 57. 

Winged and walking spirits, 6. 
Winter clouds, 139. 
Winter, North and South, 143. 
Wit, 75. . ^^^ 

Woman and Christiamty, 101. 



Woman as a gospel, 84. 
Woman ennobled by man's love, 

85. 
Woman feels ; man reasons, 4. 
Woman's instinctive silence, 87. 
Woman's life within, 92. 
Woman's mission, 104. 
Woman's moral influence, 99. 
Woman's nature, 89. 
Woman's spiritual power, 103. 
Woman's veneration, 86. 
World conflicts, 37. 

Yankee grit, 184. 



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